EviBack is presented, an evidence- constrained Teacher backoff that supplies auxiliary super- vision to such groups while preserving verifiable Actor re- wards, and separates evidence assessment from answer refine- ment, preventing reference answers from overriding evidence- insufficiency judgments.
Abstract
Reinforcement learning enables Agentic RAG systems to learn multi-turn search from verifiable outcome rewards, but all- zero rollout groups provide no comparative signal and may hide useful search behavior. We present EviBack, an evidence- constrained Teacher backoff that supplies auxiliary super- vision to such groups while preserving verifiable Actor re- wards. It separates evidence assessment from answer refine- ment, preventing reference answers from overriding evidence- insufficiency judgments. A fully automated, end-to-end GPT- 5.5-assisted APE pipeline starts from a manually authored single-prompt dual-task Teacher, automatically partitions and labels rollout data, and performs ablation, task decomposition, evaluation, and selection to produce a gated two-stage Teacher. Compared with the manual design, the resulting Teacher im- proves downstream F1 and valid-answer rate while reduc- ing search, duplicate queries, and forced termination. Across seven open-domain QA benchmarks and three Qwen3 scales, EviBack improves F1 over Search-R1 and raises both single- and multi-hop macro F1. We guarantee that the code will be made publicly available at a later stage.
This work proposes AgentOPSD, a critic-free, recursive method for turn-level credit assignment in agentic reinforcement learning that aggregates token-level teacher-student log-probability gaps into turn-level evidence and recursively updates a Bayesian belief state in log-odds space.
Zi-Han Wang, Zhengxi Lu, Zhiyuan Yao et al.· 1 citation
EviSD is proposed, an evidence-conditioned self-distillation framework that uses instance-level supporting evidence as privileged information for search actions and golden answers as complementary privilege for answer actions, and achieves the highest macro-average Exact Match in all evaluated settings.
Jianan Xie, Xin Sun, Zhongqi Chen et al.· 0 citations
Group-Reflective Self-Distillation (GRSD), which derives capability-aligned and outcome-discriminative guidance from the policy's own verified rollouts, and refines turn-level credit assignment by modulating outcome-based advantages while preserving the verifier-determined learning direction.
Training open-ended agents via reinforcement learning (RL) is hindered by the lack of verifiable gold answers and scalable rubrics. Moreover, even near the model's capability boundary, long-horizon open-ended agentic tasks often yield brittle and unstable rewards, resulting in weak or noisy rollout contrast that obscures fine-grained optimization signals for group-based policy learning. To address these challenges, we propose ARISE-RL, a novel full-cycle self-evolution framework that couples a task/rubric Generator and a reasoning Solver through rubric-mediated co-evolution. The Generator grounds tool-related rubric criteria in real tool observations and is rewarded for producing valid, intermediate-difficulty tasks aligned with the Solver's evolving capability boundary. The Solver, in turn, learns from fine-grained rubric satisfaction signals through multi-step reasoning and tool use. We further introduce Reward-Gated Self-Evolution Distillation (RG-SED), which selectively distills a memory-augmented variant of the same policy back into itself only when the memory yields empirical reward improvement, thereby reducing distribution mismatch and avoiding blind imitation of noisy guidance. Finally, to support rigorous evaluation, we present ECR-Bench, an expert-calibrated rubric benchmark suite covering single-tool deep research and multi-tool travel planning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ARISE-RL consistently achieves robust and stable overall state-of-the-art performance across all evaluated benchmarks.
Fanrui Zhang, Ruixue Ding, Qiang Zhang et al.· 0 citations
Experiments on challenging reasoning benchmarks show that H$^2$SD achieves the strongest overall performance among representative RLVR and self-distillation baselines, with stable optimization and a favorable accuracy-efficiency trade-off.
Qi Cai, Yi-Chuan Ma, Linyang Li et al.· arXiv.org· 2 citations
CAFE (Coupled Agent--Feedback Evolution), a framework in which a shared-parameter model alternates between search-agent and critic roles, is introduced, suggesting that a self-improving search agent needs feedback that co-evolves with the policy it guides.
Boyang Liu, Senjie Jin, Pei-Xin Wang et al.· 0 citations
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