Beyond Ten Turns: Unlocking Long-Horizon Agentic Search with Large-Scale Asynchronous RL
This addresses the scalability and efficiency issues in search intelligence for open-source agents, offering a novel training approach with competitive performance gains.
The paper tackles the problem of limited search capabilities in open-source LLM-based agents by introducing ASearcher, a scalable asynchronous RL training method that enables long-horizon search, achieving Avg@4 scores of 51.1 on xBench and 58.7 on GAIA, with tool calls exceeding 100 turns.
Recent advancements in LLM-based agents have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in handling complex, knowledge-intensive tasks by integrating external tools. Among diverse choices of tools, search tools play a pivotal role in accessing vast external knowledge. However, open-source agents still fall short of achieving expert-level Search Intelligence, the ability to resolve ambiguous queries, generate precise searches, analyze results, and conduct thorough exploration. Existing approaches fall short in scalability, efficiency, and data quality. For example, small turn limits in existing online RL methods, e.g. <=10, restrict complex strategy learning. This paper introduces ASearcher, an open-source project for large-scale RL training of search agents. Our key contributions include: (1) Scalable fully asynchronous RL training that enables long-horizon search while maintaining high training efficiency. (2) A prompt-based LLM agent that autonomously synthesizes high-quality and challenging QAs, creating a large-scale QA dataset. Through RL training, our prompt-based QwQ-32B agent achieves substantial improvements, with 78.0% and 34.3% Avg@4 gains on xBench and GAIA, respectively. Notably, our agent exhibits extreme long-horizon search, with tool calls exceeding 100 turns and output tokens exceeding 400k during training time. With a simple agent design and no external LLMs, ASearcher-Web-QwQ achieves Avg@4 scores of 51.1 on xBench and 58.7 on GAIA, surpassing existing open-source 32B agents. Finally, we also show that ASearcher-Web-QwQ could achieve performance of commercial systems using external summary tool in a zero-shot transfer manner and test-time search. We open-source our models, training data, and codes in https://github.com/inclusionAI/ASearcher.