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Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved significant advances in reasoning tasks. A key approach is tree-based search with verifiers, which expand candidate reasoning paths and use reward models to guide pruning and selection. Although…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-01 Yingqian Cui , Zhenwei Dai , Pengfei He , Bing He , Hui Liu , Xianfeng Tang , Jingying Zeng , Suhang Wang , Yue Xing , Jiliang Tang , Benoit Dumoulin

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems have emerged as a pivotal methodology for enhancing Large Language Models (LLMs) through the dynamic integration of external knowledge. To further improve RAG's flexibility, Agentic RAG…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Hao Sun , Zile Qiao , Bo Wang , Guoxin Chen , Yingyan Hou , Yong Jiang , Pengjun Xie , Fei Huang , Yan Zhang

Reasoning-augmented search agents, such as Search-R1, are trained to reason, search, and generate the final answer iteratively. Nevertheless, due to their limited capabilities in reasoning and search, their performance on multi-hop QA…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Shu Zhao , Tan Yu , Anbang Xu

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) connects large language models (LLMs) to external knowledge, but single-round retrieval is often insufficient for complex multi-hop questions. To enhance search capabilities for complex tasks, most…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Kun Chen , Qingchao Kong , Zhao Feifei , Wenji Mao

Large language models excel on static benchmarks, but their ability as self-learning agents in dynamic environments remains unclear. We evaluate three prompting strategies: self-reflection, heuristic mutation, and planning across dynamic…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-08-12 Annie Wong , Thomas Bäck , Aske Plaat , Niki van Stein , Anna V. Kononova

Search-augmented reasoning agents interleave internal reasoning with calls to an external retriever, and their performance relies on the quality of each issued query. However, under outcome-reward reinforcement learning, every search…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Yufei Ma , Zihan Liang , Ben Chen , Zhipeng Qian , Huangyu Dai , Lingtao Mao , Xuxin Zhang , Chenyi Lei , Wenwu Ou

Large language models (LLMs) excel in tasks like question answering and dialogue, but complex tasks requiring interaction, such as negotiation and persuasion, require additional long-horizon reasoning and planning. Reinforcement learning…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-04 Joey Hong , Anca Dragan , Sergey Levine

Sequential planning in large state space and action space quickly becomes intractable due to combinatorial explosion of the search space. Heuristic methods, like monte-carlo tree search, though effective for large state space, but struggle…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-12-13 Swarna Kamal Paul

Agentic reinforcement learning (RL) for Large Language Models (LLMs) critically depends on the exploration capability of the base policy, as training signals emerge only within its in-capability region. For tasks where the base policy…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Yuxiang Ji , Zengbin Wang , Yong Wang , Shidong Yang , Ziyu Ma , Guanhua Chen , Zonghua Sun , Liaoni Wu , Xiangxiang Chu

Large language models (LLMs) excel at knowledge-intensive question answering and reasoning, yet their real-world deployment remains constrained by knowledge cutoff, hallucination, and limited interaction modalities. Augmenting LLMs with…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-13 Daocheng Fu , Jianbiao Mei , Licheng Wen , Xuemeng Yang , Cheng Yang , Rong Wu , Tao Hu , Siqi Li , Yufan Shen , Xinyu Cai , Pinlong Cai , Botian Shi , Yong Liu , Yu Qiao

Large language models (LLMs) have been widely integrated into information retrieval to advance traditional techniques. However, effectively enabling LLMs to seek accurate knowledge in complex tasks remains a challenge due to the complexity…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Zhengliang Shi , Lingyong Yan , Dawei Yin , Suzan Verberne , Maarten de Rijke , Zhaochun Ren

Training large language models (LLMs) to reason via reinforcement learning (RL) significantly improves their problem-solving capabilities. In agentic settings, existing methods like ReAct prompt LLMs to explicitly plan before every action;…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in natural language tasks requiring complex reasoning, yet their application in agentic, multi-step reasoning within interactive environments remains a difficult challenge.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-08-15 Pranav Putta , Edmund Mills , Naman Garg , Sumeet Motwani , Chelsea Finn , Divyansh Garg , Rafael Rafailov

Language models significantly benefit from context tokens, such as prompts or scratchpads. They perform better when prompted with informative instructions, and they acquire new reasoning capabilities by generating a scratch-pad before…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-03 Charlie Snell , Dan Klein , Ruiqi Zhong

Multi-hop question answering (QA) requires systems to iteratively retrieve evidence and reason across multiple hops. While recent RAG and agentic methods report strong results, the underlying retrieval--reasoning \emph{process} is often…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-05 Yuelyu Ji , Zhuochun Li , Rui Meng , Daqing He

The prevailing approach to distilling reasoning from Large Language Models (LLMs)-behavioral cloning from textual rationales-is fundamentally limited. It teaches Small Language Models (SLMs) to mimic surface-level patterns rather than the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-02 Xiangyu Wen , Junhua Huang , Zeju Li , Min Li , Jianyuan Zhong , Zhijian Xu , Mingxuan Yuan , Yongxiang Huang , Qiang Xu

Retrieval-augmented large language models, when optimized with outcome-level rewards, can achieve strong answer accuracy on multi-hop questions. However, under noisy retrieval, models frequently suffer from "right-answer-wrong-reason…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Yu Liu , Wenxiao Zhang , Diandian Guo , Cong Cao , Fangfang Yuan , Qiang Sun , Yanbing Liu , Jin B. Hong , Zhiyuan Ma

Multi-agent debate has been shown to improve reasoning in large language models (LLMs). However, it is compute-intensive, requiring generation of long transcripts before answering questions. To address this inefficiency, we develop a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-29 John Seon Keun Yi , Aaron Mueller , Dokyun Lee

Agentic search has recently emerged as a powerful paradigm, where an agent interleaves multi-step reasoning with on-demand retrieval to solve complex questions. Despite its success, how to design a retriever for agentic search remains…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2026-01-22 Wenhan Liu , Xinyu Ma , Yutao Zhu , Yuchen Li , Daiting Shi , Dawei Yin , Zhicheng Dou

Prior work has shown that a significant driver of performance in reasoning models is their ability to reason and self-correct. A distinctive marker in these reasoning traces is the token wait, which often signals reasoning behavior such as…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Dmitrii Troitskii , Koyena Pal , Chris Wendler , Callum Stuart McDougall , Neel Nanda