用模拟搜索训练大模型,不用真搜也能学会高效检索。
ZeroSearch: Incentivize the Search Capability of LLMs without Searching
- 训练时用自动生成的假文档替代真实搜索,避免高成本和噪声。
- 3B模型能学好检索,14B模型性能还超过真实搜索引擎。
- 适合想低成本提升模型搜索能力的研究者或开发者。
有效信息搜索对提升大语言模型的推理与生成能力至关重要。近期研究通过强化学习(RL)让模型在真实环境中与搜索引擎交互以增强搜索能力,但面临两大挑战:(1)文档质量不可控,返回结果噪声大,影响训练稳定性;(2)API调用成本过高,频繁采样可能达数十万次,严重制约可扩展性。为此,我们提出ZeroSearch,一种新型强化学习框架,训练时使用模拟搜索激励模型使用真实搜索引擎的能力。首先通过轻量级监督微调,将大模型转化为可生成有效与噪声文档的检索模块。在强化学习阶段,采用基于课程的学习策略,逐步降低生成文档质量,持续激发模型在日益复杂的检索场景中的推理能力。大量实验表明,以3B模型为检索模块的ZeroSearch有效提升了搜索能力;7B模型表现媲美真实搜索引擎,14B模型甚至超越之。该方法在不同参数规模的基座与指令微调模型上均具有良好泛化性,并兼容多种强化学习算法。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Effective information searching is essential for enhancing the reasoning and generation capabilities of large language models (LLMs). Recent research has explored using reinforcement learning (RL) to improve LLMs' search capabilities by interacting with live search engines in real-world environments. While these approaches show promising results, they face two major challenges: (1) Uncontrolled Document Quality: The quality of documents returned by search engines is often unpredictable, introducing noise and instability into the training process. (2) Prohibitively High API Costs: RL training requires frequent rollouts, potentially involving hundreds of thousands of search requests, which incur substantial API expenses and severely constrain scalability. To address these challenges, we introduce ZeroSearch, a novel RL framework that incentivizes the capabilities of LLMs to use a real search engine with simulated searches during training. Our approach begins with lightweight supervised fine-tuning to transform the LLM into a retrieval module capable of generating both useful and noisy documents in response to a query. During RL training, we employ a curriculum-based rollout strategy that incrementally degrades the quality of generated documents, progressively eliciting the model's reasoning ability by exposing it to increasingly challenging retrieval scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ZeroSearch effectively incentivizes the search capabilities of LLMs using a 3B LLM as the retrieval module. Remarkably, a 7B retrieval module achieves comparable performance to the real search engine, while a 14B retrieval module even surpasses it. Furthermore, it generalizes well across both base and instruction-tuned models of various parameter sizes and is compatible with a wide range of RL algorithms.
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