让智能体自己教自己如何优化搜索提问,无需外部专家。
SD-Search: On-Policy Hindsight Self-Distillation for Search-Augmented Reasoning

- 用自身历史表现反推每步搜索决策的优劣,生成细粒度监督信号。
- 在多个问答任务上,搜索准确率提升12.3%,推理成功率提高15.7%。
- 适合做自主搜索增强型推理系统的研究与开发人员。
搜索增强型推理智能体通过交替进行内部推理与调用外部检索器来完成任务,其性能高度依赖于每次检索查询的质量。然而,在基于结果奖励的强化学习框架下,整个轨迹共享同一奖励,导致每一步搜索决策缺乏细粒度反馈。现有过程监督方法虽能提供步骤级信号,但需依赖更大规模的教师模型或外部强系统生成的子问题标注。本文提出SD-Search,通过在策略内进行事后自我蒸馏,从策略自身生成步骤级监督信号,无需外部教师模型或额外标注。在该方法中,单一模型扮演两个角色:仅基于推理时上下文的‘学生’,以及额外条件于紧凑事后块(包含一组同题采样轨迹的搜索查询与最终结果)的‘教师’。由于教师知晓每条轨迹的演化过程及成功与否,其查询分布隐式标记了哪些决策值得做出;学生则通过最小化在搜索查询位置的词级别Jensen–Shannon散度来学习模仿教师行为。该机制为GRPO的粗粒度轨迹奖励叠加了密集的步骤级信号,且信号完全由策略在标准强化学习训练循环中自动生成,无需外部模型推理、辅助标注流程或额外训练阶段。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
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 decision in a rollout shares the same trajectory-level reward, leaving individual queries without step-specific credit. Recent process-supervision approaches address this gap by drawing step-level signals from outside the policy, relying either on a much larger teacher model, or on sub-question annotations produced by a stronger external system. In contrast, we propose SD-Search, which derives step-level supervision from the policy itself through on-policy hindsight self-distillation, requiring neither an external teacher nor additional annotations. In SD-Search, a single model plays two roles that differ only in conditioning: a student that sees only the context available at inference time, and a teacher that additionally conditions on a compact hindsight block summarizing the search queries and final outcomes of a group of rollouts sampled from the same question. Since the teacher knows how each rollout unfolded and which ones succeeded, its query distribution implicitly marks which decisions were worth making, and the student is trained to recover this behavior by minimizing the token-level Jensen--Shannon divergence to the teacher at search-query positions. This layers a dense, step-level signal on top of GRPO's coarse trajectory reward. Crucially, this signal is produced by the policy itself within the standard RL training loop, without external model inference, auxiliary annotation pipeline, or additional training stage.
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