SOAR: Source-Aware Reinforcement Learning with Precise Credit Assignment for Search Agents

Abstract:Reinforcement learning (RL) for search agents often suffers from evidence fabrication, a failure mode where agents bypass external information ($E_{ext}$) and fabricate an incorrect answer. We argue that this fabrication arises from an over-reliance on unreliable internal knowledge ($E_{int}$) as shortcuts due to the inherent opacity of reasoning trajectories. To address this, we propose SOAR (SOurce-Aware Reinforcement learning), a paradigm that transforms monolithic reasoning into source-explicit trajectories. SOAR (i) disentangles $E_{ext}$ and $E_{int}$ into parallel, observable streams via a Source-Aware Workflow, and (ii) incorporates Source-Consistent Reward to guide the policy evolution. By making information-source attribution explicit, SOAR enables precise credit assignment between different knowledge streams. Evaluations show that SOAR outperforms baselines on 3B and 7B backbones by 7.3% and 5.4%, while reducing evidence fabrication by 74.8%. These confirm that SOAR significantly improves performance on knowledge-intensive benchmarks while effectively mitigating evidence fabrication, fostering more faithful and grounded reasoning with enhanced robustness.

Computation and Language (cs.CL)

arXiv:2610.13157 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2610.13157v1 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.13157 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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