SIGHT: Reinforcement Learning with Self-Evidence and Information-Gain Diverse Branching for Search Agent
On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Web, search, and research agents
Abstract (arXiv)
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has empowered Large Language Models (LLMs) to master autonomous search for complex question answering. However, particularly within multi-turn search scenarios, this interaction introduces a critical challenge: search results often suffer from high redundancy and low signal-to-noise ratios. Consequently, agents easily fall into "Tunnel Vision," where the forced interpretation of early noisy retrievals leads to irreversible error accumulation. To address these challenges, we propose SIGHT, a framework that enhances search-based reasoning through Self-Evidence Support (SES) and Information-Gain Driven Diverse Branching. SIGHT distills search results into high-fidelity evidence via SES and calculates an Information Gain score to pinpoint pivotal states where observations maximally reduce uncertainty. This score guides Dynamic Prompting Interventions - including de-duplication, reflection, or adaptive branching - to spawn new branches with SES. Finally, by integrating SES and correctness rewards via Group Relative Policy Optimization, SIGHT internalizes robust exploration strategies without external verifiers. Experiments on single-hop and multi-hop QA benchmarks demonstrate that SIGHT significantly outperforms existing approaches, particularly in complex reasoning scenarios, using fewer search steps.
Key facts. Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Web, search, and research agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 17 of its 33 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 12 Feb 2026.
Builds on
17 of 33 references.
Closest ancestors · 4
Same direction, newest first
- 2026WebAnchor: Anchoring Agent Planning to Stabilize Long-Horizon Web Reasoning6 Jan
- 2025ParallelMuse: Agentic Parallel Thinking for Deep Information Seeking28 Oct
- 2025Deep Research: A Survey of Autonomous Research Agents18 Aug
- 2025WebSailor: Navigating Super-human Reasoning for Web Agent3 Jul
Other references · 13
- 2017Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithmscited by 14,441
- 2020Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answeringcited by 3,779
- 2017TriviaQA: A Large Scale Distantly Supervised Challenge Dataset for Reading Comprehensioncited by 2,895
- 2025Search-R1: Training LLMs to Reason and Leverage Search Engines with Reinforcement Learningcited by 1,371
- 2020Constructing A Multi-hop QA Dataset for Comprehensive Evaluation of Reasoning Stepscited by 1,259
- 2022Text Embeddings by Weakly-Supervised Contrastive Pre-trainingcited by 1,216
- 2022Measuring and Narrowing the Compositionality Gap in Language Modelscited by 1,054
- 2021MuSiQue: Multihop Questions via Single-hop Question Compositioncited by 893
- 2025Search and Refine During Think: Facilitating Knowledge Refinement for Improved Retrieval-Augmented Reasoningcited by 34
- 2026Search-R2: Enhancing Search-Integrated Reasoning via Actor-Refiner Collaborationcited by 10
- 2026LRAS: Advanced Legal Reasoning with Agentic Searchcited by 8
- 2025Reinforcement Learning for Tool-Integrated Interleaved Thinking towards Cross-Domain Generalizationcited by 7
1 more
- 2025CARL: Criticality-Aware Agentic Reinforcement Learningcited by 5
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 3.
3 papers.
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2026Contextual Information Policy Optimization for Search Agents
- 2026SD-Search: On-Policy Hindsight Self-Distillation for Search-Augmented Reasoning
- 2026SearchArt: Training Long-Horizon Search Agent with Scalable Synthetic and Verified Task
- 2026Can David Beat Goliath? On Multi-Hop Reasoning with Resource-Constrained Agents
- 2026Plan Before Search: Search Agents Need Plan
- 2026EviSD: Evidence-Conditioned Self-Distillation for Search-Augmented Agents
- 2026Seek Before You Move: Evidence Seeking for Progress Grounding in Vision-Language Navigation
- 2026EviBack: Search-Agent Reinforcement Learning via Evidence-Constrained Teacher Backoff