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Nan Duan

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Preprint Aug 2026

SearchMaster: Grounded and Regulated Self-Play for Search Agents

Training LLM-based search agents requires high-quality search data: tasks that demand genuine multi-hop retrieval and trajectories that use search tools effectively. Existing pipelines often depend on human-written tasks, expert demonstrations, or stronger teacher models. We present SearchMaster, a self-play framework that trains a single LLM from search tasks it generates, solves, and verifies in a local search environment. The key challenge is that self-generated tasks and rollouts can yield misleading signals: pseudo multi-hop questions, success-rate difficulty estimates that ignore search depth, and rollouts with excessive opening but little targeted evidence acquisition. SearchMaster addresses these failure modes with three controls. An Evidence-Chain Generator (ECG) grounds task generation in explicit cross-document evidence chains to reduce pseudo multi-hop questions. A Search-Depth Reward (SDR) scores task difficulty by the search depth of successful rollouts rather than success rate alone, keeping retained tasks search-intensive. An Over-Opening Penalty (OOP) regulates tool use by discouraging excessive document opening, avoiding long but shallow browsing. Verified Proposer and Solver rollouts are then jointly optimized with GRPO. Across six deep-search benchmarks, SearchMaster improves a Qwen3.5-9B backbone from 38.19% to 51.52% average accuracy, with a 30.1-point gain on BrowseComp-Plus. These results show that grounded and regulated self-play can provide effective search-agent training data without human-labeled QA pairs or expert demonstrations. The code is available at https://github.com/WentaoTan/SearchMaster.

Wentao Tan, Qiong Cao, Jiaqi Wang et al. · 0 citations
Preprint Aug 2026

SearchAuditor: Auditing and Attributing Failures in Long-Horizon Search Agents

A benchmark that evaluates whether LLM auditors can localize, attribute, and repair search-agent failures through evidence-grounded adjudication, and proposes SearchAuditor, a multi-perspective auditing framework that effectively localizes, attributes, and repairs search-agent failures through evidence-grounded adjudication.

Zhixiang Liang, Yifei Liu, Yi-Dan Huang et al. · 0 citations
Preprint Aug 2026

FailForge: Distilling Procedural Competence from Persistent Failures into Code Agents

FailForge is proposed, an agentic framework that converts failed rollouts into training signal, and recovers over 26% of previously failed instances at marginal additional cost, and training Qwen3.5-4B on the augmented corpus improves the SWE-bench Verified resolve rate by 6.6 points over a strong RFT baseline.

Dongyi Lv, E. Fushun, Aichen Cai et al. · 1 citation
Preprint Aug 2026

JoyAI-Talker: Full-Duplex Speech Interactive Large Model Built for Empathetic Voice Agents

We present JoyAI-Talker, a full-duplex speech dialogue system that delivers robust foundation model capabilities while empowering empathetic interaction and voice agent intelligence. JoyAI-Talker adopts a modular Thinker-Talker architecture and further implements a unified speech-text joint training pipeline to mitigate the common"cognitive degradation"bottleneck, thereby largely preserving the model's core textual reasoning, STEM, and logical capabilities while extending them to speech-based interaction. For expressive speech synthesis, the Talker module employs a text-controllable generation paradigm that enables natural-language instructions to flexibly control vocal attributes and localized paralinguistic events, such as laughter and sighs, supporting more expressive and fine-grained speech responses. To enhance conversational empathy, we introduce the Persona-Adaptive Empathetic Response (PAER) framework. PAER employs a hierarchical cognitive pipeline to extract non-verbal speaker cues, such as gender, age, and emotional state, from raw input audio, incorporate them into the Thinker's CoT reasoning, and generate context-adaptive responses that align semantically appropriate text with fine-grained control over utterance-level expressiveness and localized paralinguistic events, including sighs, speaking rate, and volume. We further integrate Joy-Duplex, a state-driven, plug-and-play full-duplex framework that functions as an efficient gating engine for real-time turn control. Extensive evaluations show that JoyAI-Talker achieves highly competitive performance on foundational T2T and S2T benchmarks. In full-duplex evaluation, the system reaches a high response rate of 0.88 under user interruptions while maintaining an extremely low false-trigger rate under background speech, demonstrating its readiness for fluid and natural speech dialogue.

Yinhao Bai, Jinming Chen, Yafeng Chen et al. · 1 citation

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