← 首页|学术|CAFE: Self-Improving Search Agents Need Co-Evolving Feedback
cs.AI · 2608.24794 · 2026-08-25

CAFE: Self-Improving Search Agents Need Co-Evolving Feedback

Boyang Liu, Senjie Jin, Peixin Wang, Zhangyue Yin, Yibo Wang, et al.
Search AgentsSelf-ImprovementRL
💬 结果监督无法定位搜索 agent 轨迹中间的错误;CAFE 让同一个共享参数模型交替扮演 search-agent 和 critic 两种角色,在线/离线优化耦合训练,证明只优化其中一方最终会停滞,交替更新才能持续提升。

🎯 背景

结果监督的搜索 agent 能学会何时以及如何检索证据,但终局奖励既不能定位轨迹中间的错误,也无法在错误累积之前重新引导正在进行的轨迹。把纠正性反馈当作一种学习到的轨迹内干预会把两个角色耦合在一起:agent 要决定何时请求并使用反馈,critic 则要从结果混淆、且失败模式随 agent 改进而变化的 rollout 中推断出有用的修正。

🔬 方法

CAFE(Coupled Agent-Feedback Evolution)让一个共享参数模型交替担任 search-agent 和 critic 角色。CAFE 先基于 base agent 自身的失败轨迹初始化条件反馈式恢复能力,再耦合在线与离线优化:在线 RL 阶段用 prompt 级的"请求反馈 vs 跳过"成功率差距来塑造请求回报,用反馈感知的优势整形在反馈发生前后重新加权 token 级优势;离线阶段则用 rollout 衍生的偏好优化,从匹配的成功/失败轨迹对中学习反馈能力。

📊 结果

在 7 个 agentic 搜索基准上,CAFE 平均优于所评估的 RL 搜索 agent,在全部 6 个域外基准上都保持增益,并降低了答案层面的幻觉。单边消融显示只改进 agent 或只改进 critic 都会最终陷入停滞,而交替更新二者能持续带来提升,验证了"自改进搜索 agent 需要与策略共同演化的反馈"这一核心论点。

原文摘要

▶ Abstract
Outcome-supervised search agents learn when and how to retrieve evidence, but terminal rewards neither localize intermediate errors nor redirect an ongoing trajectory before those errors compound. Treating corrective feedback as a learned in-trajectory intervention couples the two roles: the agent must decide when to request and use feedback, while the critic must infer useful corrections from outcome-confounded rollouts whose failure patterns shift as the agent improves. We introduce CAFE (Coupled Agent--Feedback Evolution), a framework in which a shared-parameter model alternates between search-agent and critic roles. CAFE initializes feedback-conditioned recovery from trajectories built around the base agent's own failures, then couples online and offline optimization. During online RL, a comparative feedback estimate uses a prompt-level call--skip success gap to shape request returns, while feedback-aware advantage shaping reweights token advantages before and after feedback. Offline, rollout-derived preference optimization learns feedback from matched successful and unsuccessful trajectories. On seven agentic search benchmarks, CAFE outperforms the evaluated RL-based search agents on average, retains its gains across all six out-of-domain benchmarks, and reduces answer-level hallucinations. One-sided ablations show that improving only the agent or only the critic eventually plateaus, whereas alternating the two updates continues to improve performance. These findings suggest that a self-improving search agent needs feedback that co-evolves with the policy it guides.
来源: arXiv:2608.24794 · 精读由高松灯生成,基于摘要与 arXiv 页面信息