# Beneficial Reasoning Behaviors in Agentic Search and Effective Post-training to Obtain Them

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.06534 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.06534/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Knowledge- and tool-augmented reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 32 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Oct 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Knowledge- and tool-augmented reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/lr/knowledge-and-tool-augmented-reasoning/)
- LLM agents and tool use / [Web, search, and research agents](https://mlsanity.com/agents/web-search-and-research-agents/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03300/) (2024)
- [Qwen3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09388/) (2025)
- [HotpotQA: A Dataset for Diverse, Explainable Multi-hop Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.09600/) (2018)
- [TriviaQA: A Large Scale Distantly Supervised Challenge Dataset for Reading Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.03551/) (2017)
- [Self-RAG: Learning to Retrieve, Generate, and Critique through Self-Reflection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11511/) (2023)
- [Search-R1: Training LLMs to Reason and Leverage Search Engines with Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09516/) (2025)
- [Understanding R1-Zero-Like Training: A Critical Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20783/) (2025)
- [Constructing A Multi-hop QA Dataset for Comprehensive Evaluation of Reasoning Steps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.01060/) (2020)
- [When Not to Trust Language Models: Investigating Effectiveness of Parametric and Non-Parametric Memories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10511/) (2022)
- [GAIA: a benchmark for General AI Assistants](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12983/) (2023)
- [Measuring and Narrowing the Compositionality Gap in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03350/) (2022)
- [MuSiQue: Multihop Questions via Single-hop Question Composition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.00573/) (2021)
- [Group-in-Group Policy Optimization for LLM Agent Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.10978/) (2025)
- [Humanity's Last Exam](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.14249/) (2025)
- [Cognitive Behaviors that Enable Self-Improving Reasoners, or, Four Habits of Highly Effective STaRs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01307/) (2025)
- [R1-Searcher: Incentivizing the Search Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.05592/) (2025)
- [WebThinker: Empowering Large Reasoning Models with Deep Research Capability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.21776/) (2025)
- [Demystifying Long Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.03373/) (2025)
- [DeepResearcher: Scaling Deep Research via Reinforcement Learning in Real-world Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.03160/) (2025)
- [WebSailor: Navigating Super-human Reasoning for Web Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.02592/) (2025)
- [WebDancer: Towards Autonomous Information Seeking Agency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.22648/) (2025)
- [WebShaper: Agentically Data Synthesizing via Information-Seeking Formalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.15061/) (2025)
- [OctoThinker: Mid-training Incentivizes Reinforcement Learning Scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.20512/) (2025)
- [Chain-of-Agents: End-to-End Agent Foundation Models via Multi-Agent Distillation and Agentic RL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.13167/) (2025)
- [e3: Learning to Explore Enables Extrapolation of Test-Time Compute for LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09026/) (2025)
- [A Comprehensive Survey of Deep Research: Systems, Methodologies, and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.12594/) (2025)
- [Chain-of-Retrieval Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.14342/) (2025)
- [Open Deep Search: Democratizing Search with Open-source Reasoning Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20201/) (2025)
- [SFR-DeepResearch: Towards Effective Reinforcement Learning for Autonomously Reasoning Single Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.06283/) (2025)
- [RAG-R1: Incentivizing the Search and Reasoning Capabilities of LLMs through Multi-query Parallelism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.02962/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Benchmark Test-Time Scaling of General LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.18998/) (2026)
- [DeepFact: Co-Evolving Benchmarks and Agents for Deep Research Factuality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.05912/) (2026)
- [GrepSeek: Training Search Agents for Direct Corpus Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.29307/) (2026)
- [Rethinking the Role of Entropy in Optimizing Tool-Use Behaviors for Large Language Model Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.02050/) (2026)
- [Effective Reinforcement Learning for Agentic Search by Recycling Zero-Variance Queries During Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.10709/) (2026)
- [Learning from AVA: Early Lessons from a Curated and Trustworthy Generative AI for Policy and Development Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.17843/) (2026)
- [From "Weak" Signals to Strong Models: Preference Delta Aggregation with LoRA Merging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.00357/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Agentic search requires large language models (LLMs) to perform multi-step search to solve complex information-seeking tasks, imposing unique challenges on their reasoning capabilities. However, what constitutes effective reasoning for agentic search and how it can be learned remains unclear. In this work, we first investigate the reasoning behaviors that enable success in agentic search. By comparing successful and failed trajectories via an LLM-based analysis pipeline, we identify four beneficial behaviors: Information Verification, Authority Evaluation, Adaptive Search, and Error Recovery. Building on this, we propose Behavior Priming, a training approach that equips agentic search models with these reasoning behaviors before reinforcement learning (RL). Specifically, it first performs supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on collected trajectories exhibiting the identified behaviors to cultivate these behaviors, and then applies standard RL to further improve task performance. Experiments on Qwen3-1.7B and Llama3.2-3B-Instruct show that Behavior Priming yields relative improvements over direct RL by 37.2% on three web benchmarks and 6.2% on seven multi-hop QA benchmarks, and outperforms the SFT-then-RL baseline using outcome-correct trajectories for fine-tuning. Crucially, we show that these reasoning behaviors matter more than outcome correctness in the priming stage prior to RL. Further analysis reveals that Behavior Priming enhances exploration (pass@8) and test-time scaling (search step number), providing a robust foundation for RL. Our code are avalible at https://github.com/cxcscmu/Behavior-Priming-for-Agentic-Search.