AI-SearchPlanner: Modular Agentic Search via Pareto-Optimal Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2508.20368v3
• Date: Tue, 09 Sep 2025 06:38:41 GMT
• Title: AI-SearchPlanner: Modular Agentic Search via Pareto-Optimal Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning
• Authors: Lang Mei, Zhihan Yang, Chong Chen,
• Abstract summary: We propose textbfAI-SearchPlanner, a novel reinforcement learning framework designed to enhance the performance of frozen QA models by focusing on search planning.<n>Experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that AI SearchPlanner outperforms existing RL-based search agents in both effectiveness and efficiency.
• Score: 7.913125061214038
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Recent studies have explored integrating Large Language Models (LLMs) with search engines to leverage both the LLMs' internal pre-trained knowledge and external information. Specially, reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising paradigm for enhancing LLM reasoning through multi-turn interactions with search engines. However, existing RL-based search agents rely on a single LLM to handle both search planning and question-answering (QA) tasks in an end-to-end manner, which limits their ability to optimize both capabilities simultaneously. In practice, sophisticated AI search systems often employ a large, frozen LLM (e.g., GPT-4, DeepSeek-R1) to ensure high-quality QA. Thus, a more effective and efficient approach is to utilize a small, trainable LLM dedicated to search planning. In this paper, we propose \textbf{AI-SearchPlanner}, a novel reinforcement learning framework designed to enhance the performance of frozen QA models by focusing on search planning. Specifically, our approach introduces three key innovations: 1) Decoupling the Architecture of the Search Planner and Generator, 2) Dual-Reward Alignment for Search Planning, and 3) Pareto Optimization of Planning Utility and Cost, to achieve the objectives. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that AI SearchPlanner outperforms existing RL-based search agents in both effectiveness and efficiency, while exhibiting strong generalization capabilities across diverse frozen QA models and data domains.

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