Search-P1: Path-Centric Reward Shaping for Stable and Efficient Agentic RAG Training
Tianle Xia, Ming Xu, Lingxiang Hu, Yiding Sun, Wenwei Li, Linfang Shang, Liqun Liu, Peng Shu 等 10 位作者
原文摘要
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) enhances large language models (LLMs) by incorporating external knowledge, yet traditional single-round retrieval struggles with complex multi-step reasoning.Agentic RAG addresses this by enabling LLMs to dynamically decide when and what to retrieve, but current RL-based training methods suffer from sparse outcome rewards that discard intermediate signals and low sample efficiency where failed samples contribute nothing.We propose Search-P1, a framework that introduces path-centric reward shaping for agentic RAG training, comprising two key components: (1) Path-Centric Reward, which evaluates the structural quality of reasoning trajectories through order-agnostic step coverage and soft scoring that extracts learning signals even from failed samples, and (2) Dual-Track Path Scoring with offline-generated reference planners that assesses paths from both self-consistency and reference-alignment perspectives.Experiments on multiple QA benchmarks demonstrate that Search-P1 achieves significant improvements over Search-R1 and other strong baselines, with an average accuracy gain of 7.7 points.
cs.CL · cs.AI
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 6: Industry Track) · 2026 · 正式发表