Deliberative Searcher: Improving LLM Reliability via Reinforcement Learning with constraints
- URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2507.16727v2
- Date: Wed, 23 Jul 2025 03:52:14 GMT
- Title: Deliberative Searcher: Improving LLM Reliability via Reinforcement Learning with constraints
- Authors: Zhenyun Yin, Shujie Wang, Xuhong Wang, Xingjun Ma, Yinchun Wang,
- Abstract summary: We propose textbfDeliberative Searcher, the first framework to integrate certainty calibration with retrieval-based search for open-domain question answering.<n>The agent performs multi-step reflection and verification over Wikipedia data and is trained with a reinforcement learning algorithm that optimize for accuracy under a soft reliability constraint.
- Score: 18.10515528600634
- License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
- Abstract: Improving the reliability of large language models (LLMs) is critical for deploying them in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we propose \textbf{Deliberative Searcher}, the first framework to integrate certainty calibration with retrieval-based search for open-domain question answering. The agent performs multi-step reflection and verification over Wikipedia data and is trained with a reinforcement learning algorithm that optimizes for accuracy under a soft reliability constraint. Empirical results show that proposed method improves alignment between model confidence and correctness, leading to more trustworthy outputs. This paper will be continuously updated.
Related papers
- On Calibration of Large Language Models: From Response To Capability [66.59139960234326]
Large language models (LLMs) are widely deployed as general-purpose problem solvers.<n>We introduce capability calibration, which targets the model's expected accuracy on a query.<n>Our results demonstrate that capability-calibrated confidence improves pass@$k$ prediction and inference budget allocation.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2026-02-14T01:07:45Z) - LLM-Centric RAG with Multi-Granular Indexing and Confidence Constraints [5.2604064919135896]
This paper addresses the issues of insufficient coverage, unstable results, and limited reliability in retrieval-augmented generation under complex knowledge environments.<n>It proposes a confidence control method that integrates multi-granularity memory indexing with uncertainty estimation.<n>The results show that the method achieves superior performance over existing models in QA accuracy, retrieval recall, ranking quality, and factual consistency.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2025-10-30T23:48:37Z) - MaP: A Unified Framework for Reliable Evaluation of Pre-training Dynamics [72.00014675808228]
Instability in Large Language Models evaluation process obscures true learning dynamics.<n>We introduce textbfMaP, a framework that integrates underlineMerging underlineand the underlinePass@k metric.<n>Experiments show that MaP yields significantly smoother performance curves, reduces inter-run variance, and ensures more consistent rankings.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2025-10-10T11:40:27Z) - ReFIne: A Framework for Trustworthy Large Reasoning Models with Reliability, Faithfulness, and Interpretability [23.70973331911138]
We argue that usable reasoning systems must be trustworthy, characterized by three properties: interpretability, faithfulness, and reliability.<n>We propose ReFIne, a new training framework that integrates supervised fine-tuning with GRPO to encourage models to improve interpretability.<n>Our experimental results show that ReFIne models generate clearer and better-structured reasoning traces.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2025-10-10T07:08:44Z) - Rethinking LLM Parametric Knowledge as Post-retrieval Confidence for Dynamic Retrieval and Reranking [23.1400319714807]
Large Language Models (LLMs) often generate inaccurate responses (hallucinations) when faced with questions beyond their knowledge scope.<n>Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) addresses this by leveraging external knowledge, but a critical challenge remains: determining whether retrieved contexts effectively enhance the models ability to answer specific queries.<n>This challenge underscores the importance of knowledge boundary awareness, which current methods-relying on discrete labels or limited signals-fail to address adequately.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2025-09-08T09:37:20Z) - Mind the Generation Process: Fine-Grained Confidence Estimation During LLM Generation [63.49409574310576]
Large language models (LLMs) exhibit overconfidence, assigning high confidence scores to incorrect predictions.<n>We introduce FineCE, a novel confidence estimation method that delivers accurate, fine-grained confidence scores during text generation.<n>Our code and all baselines used in the paper are available on GitHub.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2025-08-16T13:29:35Z) - SGIC: A Self-Guided Iterative Calibration Framework for RAG [45.17496149653415]
Large language models (LLMs) capitalize on their robust in-context reasoning.<n>We present a new framework that employs uncertainty scores as a tool.<n>We also introduce an innovative approach for constructing an iterative self-calibration training set.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2025-06-19T09:45:13Z) - Trust, But Verify: A Self-Verification Approach to Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards [67.86091419220816]
Large Language Models (LLMs) show great promise in complex reasoning.<n>A prevalent issue is superficial self-reflection'', where models fail to robustly verify their own outputs.<n>We introduce RISE (Reinforcing Reasoning with Self-Verification), a novel online RL framework designed to tackle this.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2025-05-19T17:59:31Z) - Object-Level Verbalized Confidence Calibration in Vision-Language Models via Semantic Perturbation [26.580361841501514]
Vision-language models (VLMs) excel in various multimodal tasks but frequently suffer from poor calibration.<n>This miscalibration undermines user trust, especially when models confidently provide incorrect or fabricated information.<n>We propose a novel Confidence through Semantic Perturbation (CSP) framework to improve the calibration of verbalized confidence for object-centric queries.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2025-04-21T04:01:22Z) - Lightweight and Direct Document Relevance Optimization for Generative Information Retrieval [49.669503570350166]
Generative information retrieval (GenIR) is a promising neural retrieval paradigm that formulates document retrieval as a document identifier (docid) generation task.<n>Existing GenIR models suffer from token-level misalignment, where models trained to predict the next token often fail to capture document-level relevance effectively.<n>We propose direct document relevance optimization (DDRO), which aligns token-level docid generation with document-level relevance estimation through direct optimization via pairwise ranking.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2025-04-07T15:27:37Z) - Rewarding Doubt: A Reinforcement Learning Approach to Calibrated Confidence Expression of Large Language Models [34.59785123314865]
A safe and trustworthy use of Large Language Models (LLMs) requires an accurate expression of confidence in their answers.<n>We propose a novel Reinforcement Learning approach that allows to directly fine-tune LLMs to express calibrated confidence estimates alongside their answers to factual questions.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2025-03-04T13:48:50Z) - Enhancing LLM Reliability via Explicit Knowledge Boundary Modeling [48.15636223774418]
Large language models (LLMs) are prone to hallucination stemming from misaligned self-awareness.<n>We propose the Explicit Knowledge Boundary Modeling framework to integrate fast and slow reasoning systems to harmonize reliability and usability.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2025-03-04T03:16:02Z) - Aligning Large Language Models for Faithful Integrity Against Opposing Argument [71.33552795870544]
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in complex reasoning tasks.<n>They can be easily misled by unfaithful arguments during conversations, even when their original statements are correct.<n>We propose a novel framework, named Alignment for Faithful Integrity with Confidence Estimation.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2025-01-02T16:38:21Z) - Graph-based Confidence Calibration for Large Language Models [22.394717844099684]
We propose using an auxiliary learning model to assess response correctness based on the self-consistency of multiple outputs generated by the large language models.<n>Our method builds a consistency graph to represent the agreement among multiple responses and uses a graph neural network (GNN) to estimate the likelihood that each response is correct.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2024-11-03T20:36:44Z) - UncertaintyRAG: Span-Level Uncertainty Enhanced Long-Context Modeling for Retrieval-Augmented Generation [93.38604803625294]
We present UncertaintyRAG, a novel approach for long-context Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)
We use Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR)-based span uncertainty to estimate similarity between text chunks.
UncertaintyRAG outperforms baselines by 2.03% on LLaMA-2-7B, achieving state-of-the-art results.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2024-10-03T17:39:38Z) - Test-Time Fairness and Robustness in Large Language Models [17.758735680493917]
Frontier Large Language Models (LLMs) can be socially discriminatory or sensitive to spurious features of their inputs.
Existing solutions, which instruct the LLM to be fair or robust, rely on the model's implicit understanding of bias.
We show that our prompting strategy, unlike implicit instructions, consistently reduces the bias of frontier LLMs.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2024-06-11T20:05:15Z) - Trust, but Verify: Using Self-Supervised Probing to Improve
Trustworthiness [29.320691367586004]
We introduce a new approach of self-supervised probing, which enables us to check and mitigate the overconfidence issue for a trained model.
We provide a simple yet effective framework, which can be flexibly applied to existing trustworthiness-related methods in a plug-and-play manner.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2023-02-06T08:57:20Z) - Distributional Robustness and Regularization in Reinforcement Learning [62.23012916708608]
We introduce a new regularizer for empirical value functions and show that it lower bounds the Wasserstein distributionally robust value function.
It suggests using regularization as a practical tool for dealing with $textitexternal uncertainty$ in reinforcement learning.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2020-03-05T19:56:23Z)
This list is automatically generated from the titles and abstracts of the papers in this site.
This site does not guarantee the quality of this site (including all information) and is not responsible for any consequences.