EvolveSearch: An Iterative Self-Evolving Search Agent
Dingchu Zhang, Yida Zhao, Jialong Wu, Liwen Zhang, Baixuan Li, Wenbiao Yin, Yong Jiang, Yu-Feng Li, Kewei Tu, Pengjun Xie, Fei Huang
Abstract
The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has transformed the landscape of agentic information seeking capabilities through the integration of tools such as search engines and web browsers. However, current mainstream approaches for enabling LLM web search proficiency face significant challenges: supervised fine-tuning struggles with data production in open-search domains, while RL converges quickly, limiting their data utilization efficiency. To address these issues, we propose EvolveSearch, a novel iterative selfevolution framework that combines SFT and RL to enhance agentic web search capabilities without any external human-annotated reasoning data. Extensive experiments on seven multi-hop question-answering (MHQA) benchmarks demonstrate that EvolveSearch consistently improves performance across iterations, ultimately achieving an average improvement of 4.7% over the current state-of-the-art across seven benchmarks, opening the door to selfevolution agentic capabilities in open web search domains.
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Cited by top-tier papers9
- WebDancer: Towards Autonomous Information Seeking AgencyJialong Wu, Baixuan Li, Runnan Fang, Wenbiao Yin et al.NeurIPS 2025 · 194 citations
- WebShaper: Agentically Data Synthesizing via Information-Seeking FormalizationZhengwei Tao, Jialong Wu, Wenbiao Yin, Pu Wu et al.ICLR 2026 · 115 citations
- Scaling Agents via Continual Pre-trainingLiangcai Su, Zhen Zhang, Guangyu Li, Zhuo Chen et al.ICLR 2026 · 46 citations
- Erase to Improve: Erasable Reinforcement Learning for Search-Augmented LLMsKang An, Ziliang Wang, Xuhui Zheng, FaQiang Qian et al.ICLR 2026 · 6 citations
- WebSeer: Training Deeper Search Agents through Reinforcement Learning with Self-ReflectionGuanzhong He, Zhen Yang, Jinxin Liu, Bin Xu et al.ICLR 2026 · 6 citations
Builds on11
- Training language models to follow instructions with human feedbackLong Ouyang, Jeffrey Wu, Xu Jiang, Diogo Almeida et al.NeurIPS 2022 · 24,707 citations
- Generating Training Data with Language Models: Towards Zero-Shot Language UnderstandingYu Meng, Jiaxin Huang, Yu Zhang, Jiawei HanNeurIPS 2022 · 309 citations
- Fine-Tuning Language Models for FactualityKatherine Tian, Eric Mitchell, Huaxiu Yao, Christopher D. Manning et al.ICLR 2024 · 270 citations
- Large Language Models Can Self-ImproveJiaxin Huang, Shixiang Gu, Le Hou, Yuexin Wu et al.EMNLP 2023 · 184 citations
- ReSearch: Learning to Reason with Search for LLMs via Reinforcement LearningMingyang Chen, Linzhuang Sun, Tianpeng Li, Haoze Sun et al.NeurIPS 2025 · 125 citations
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