SAAS: Self-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Over-Search Mitigation in Agentic Search

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Summary

SAAS introduces a reinforcement learning framework that enhances agent self-awareness to reduce unnecessary searches in LLM-based question answering systems, balancing accuracy and computational cost.

Agentic search enables LLMs to solve complex multi-hop questions through iterative reasoning and external search. Despite the effectiveness, these systems often suffer from a critical limitation in practice: agents fail to recognize their own knowledge boundaries, blindly triggering searches when internal knowledge suffices and failing to terminate search even when adequate evidence has been collected. The lack of self-awareness leads to severe over-search, incurring substantial inference latency and prohibitive computational cost. To this end, we propose SAAS, a novel RL framework designed to cultivate dynamic self-awareness that precisely regulates search behavior without compromising accuracy. SAAS introduces three key components: (i) a search boundary modeling mechanism, which identifies the search boundary under the evolving policy by contrasting search-disabled and search-enabled rollouts; (ii) a boundary-aware reward module, which translates this boundary awareness into trajectory-level penalties, suppressing unnecessary and redundant searches; and (iii) a stage-wise optimization strategy, which leverages a sequential curriculum to prioritize reasoning over search regularization, thereby avoiding reward hacking. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SAAS substantially reduces over-search, while maintaining accuracy. Our code is anonymously released at https://github.com/XMUDeepLIT/SAAS.
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Source: https://huggingface.co/papers/2605.29796

Abstract

SAAS introduces a reinforcement learning framework that enhances agent self-awareness to reduce unnecessary searches in LLM-based question answering systems.

Agentic searchenablesLLMsto solve complexmulti-hop questionsthroughiterative reasoningandexternal search. Despite the effectiveness, these systems often suffer from a critical limitation in practice: agents fail to recognize their own knowledge boundaries, blindly triggering searches when internal knowledge suffices and failing to terminate search even when adequate evidence has been collected. The lack ofself-awarenessleads to severeover-search, incurring substantial inference latency and prohibitive computational cost. To this end, we propose SAAS, a novelRL frameworkdesigned to cultivate dynamicself-awarenessthat precisely regulates search behavior without compromising accuracy. SAAS introduces three key components: (i) asearch boundary modelingmechanism, which identifies the search boundary under the evolving policy by contrasting search-disabled and search-enabled rollouts; (ii) aboundary-aware reward module, which translates this boundary awareness intotrajectory-level penalties, suppressing unnecessary and redundant searches; and (iii) astage-wise optimizationstrategy, which leverages a sequential curriculum to prioritize reasoning over search regularization, thereby avoidingreward hacking. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SAAS substantially reducesover-search, while maintaining accuracy. Our code is anonymously released at https://github.com/XMUDeepLIT/SAAS.

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