R1-Searcher: Incentivizing the Search Capability in LLMs via
  Reinforcement Learning
Authors: name: Huatong Song; name: Jinhao Jiang; name: Yingqian Min; name: Jie Chen; name: Zhipeng Chen; name: Wayne Xin Zhao; name: Lei Fang; name: Ji-Rong Wen
Published: 2025-03-07 17:14:44

Abstract: Existing Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have shown the potential of
reinforcement learning (RL) to enhance the complex reasoning capabilities of
Large Language Models~(LLMs). While they achieve remarkable performance on
challenging tasks such as mathematics and coding, they often rely on their
internal knowledge to solve problems, which can be inadequate for
time-sensitive or knowledge-intensive questions, leading to inaccuracies and
hallucinations. To address this, we propose R1-Searcher, a novel
two-stage outcome-based RL approach designed to enhance the search capabilities
of LLMs. This method allows LLMs to autonomously invoke external search systems
to access additional knowledge during the reasoning process. Our framework
relies exclusively on RL, without requiring process rewards or distillation for
a cold start. % effectively generalizing to out-of-domain datasets and
supporting both Base and Instruct models. Our experiments demonstrate that our
method significantly outperforms previous strong RAG methods, even when
compared to the closed-source GPT-4o-mini.