Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has proven effective in enhancing the reasoning of large language models (LLMs). Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS)-based extensions improve upon vanilla RLVR (e.g., GRPO) by providing tree-based reasoning rollouts that enable fine-grained and segment-level credit assignment. However, existing methods still suffer from limited exploration diversity and inefficient reasoning. To address the above challenges, we propose reinforced efficient reasoning via semantically diverse explorations, i.e., ROSE, for LLMs. To encourage more diverse reasoning exploration, our method incorporates a semantic-entropy-based branching strategy and an 𝜀-exploration mechanism. The former operates on already sampled reasoning rollouts to capture semantic uncertainty and select branching points with high semantic divergence to generate new successive reasoning paths, whereas the latter stochastically initiates reasoning rollouts from the root, preventing the search process from becoming overly local. To improve efficiency, we design a length-aware segment-level advantage estimator that rewards concise and correct reasoning while penalizing unnecessarily long reasoning chains. Extensive experiments on various mathematical reasoning benchmarks with Qwen and Llama models validate the effectiveness and efficiency of ROSE. Codes are available at https://github.com/ZiqiZhao1/ROSE-rl.

Agentic search has recently emerged as a powerful paradigm, where an agent interleaves multi-step reasoning with on-demand retrieval to solve complex questions. Despite its success, how to design a retriever for agentic search remains largely underexplored. Existing search agents typically rely on similarity-based retrievers, while similar passages are not always useful for final answer generation. In this paper, we propose a novel retriever training framework tailored for agentic search. Unlike retrievers designed for single-turn retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) that only rely on local passage utility, we propose to use both local query-passage relevance and global answer correctness to measure passage utility in a multi-turn agentic search. We further introduce an iterative training strategy, where the search agent and the retriever are optimized bidirectionally and iteratively. Different from RAG retrievers that are only trained once with fixed questions, our retriever is continuously improved using evolving and higher-quality queries from the agent. Extensive experiments on seven single-hop and multi-hop QA benchmarks demonstrate that our retriever, termed Agentic-R, consistently outperforms strong baselines across different search agents.

Reward Models (RMs) are critical components in the Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) pipeline, directly determining the alignment quality of Large Language Models (LLMs). Recently, Generative Reward Models (GRMs) have emerged as a superior paradigm, offering higher interpretability and stronger generalization than traditional scalar RMs. However, existing methods for GRMs focus primarily on outcome-level supervision, neglecting analytical process quality, which constrains their potential. To address this, we propose ReflectRM, a novel GRM that leverages self-reflection to assess analytical quality and enhance preference modeling. ReflectRM is trained under a unified generative framework for joint modeling of response preference and analysis preference. During inference, we use its self-reflection capability to identify the most reliable analysis, from which the final preference prediction is derived. Experiments across four benchmarks show that ReflectRM consistently improves performance, achieving an average accuracy gain of +3.7 on Qwen3-4B. Further experiments confirm that response preference and analysis preference are mutually reinforcing. Notably, ReflectRM substantially mitigates positional bias, yielding +10.2 improvement compared with leading GRMs and establishing itself as a more stable evaluator. Our code is available at https://github.com/yuliangCarmelo/ReflectRM.

Generative reward models (GRMs) have emerged as a promising approach for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences by offering greater representational capacity and flexibility than traditional scalar reward models. However, GRMs face two major challenges: reliance on costly human-annotated data restricts scalability, and self-training approaches often suffer from instability and vulnerability to reward hacking. To address these issues, we propose ConsistRM, a self-training framework that enables effective and stable GRM training without human annotations. ConsistRM incorporates the Consistency-Aware Answer Reward, which produces reliable pseudo-labels with temporal consistency, thereby providing more stable model optimization. Moreover, the Consistency-Aware Critique Reward is introduced to assess semantic consistency across multiple critiques and allocates fine-grained and differentiated rewards. Experiments on five benchmark datasets across four base models demonstrate that ConsistRM outperforms vanilla Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (RFT) by an average of 1.5%. Further analysis shows that ConsistRM enhances output consistency and mitigates position bias caused by input order, highlighting the effectiveness of consistency-aware rewards in improving GRMs.Our implementation is available at https://github.com/yuliangCarmelo/ConsistRM.

A fundamental challenge in creative writing lies in reconciling the inherent tension between maintaining global coherence in long-form narratives and preserving local expressiveness in short-form texts. While long-context generation necessitates explicit macroscopic planning, short-form creativity often demands spontaneous, constraint-free expression. Existing alignment paradigms, however, typically employ static reward signals and rely heavily on high-quality supervised data, which is costly and difficult to scale. To address this, we propose UniCreative, a unified reference-free reinforcement learning framework. We first introduce AC-GenRM, an adaptive constraint-aware reward model that dynamically synthesizes query-specific criteria to provide fine-grained preference judgments. Leveraging these signals, we propose ACPO, a policy optimization algorithm that aligns models with human preferences across both content quality and structural paradigms without supervised fine-tuning and ground-truth references. Empirical results demonstrate that AC-GenRM aligns closely with expert evaluations, while ACPO significantly enhances performance across diverse writing tasks. Crucially, our analysis reveals an emergent meta-cognitive ability: the model learns to autonomously differentiate between tasks requiring rigorous planning and those favoring direct generation, validating the effectiveness of our direct alignment approach.

This paper explores the use of large language models (LLMs) for annotating document utility in training retrieval and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems, aiming to reduce dependence on costly human annotations. We address the gap between retrieval relevance and generative utility by employing LLMs to annotate document utility. To effectively utilize multiple positive samples per query, we introduce a novel loss that maximizes their summed marginal likelihood. Using the Qwen-2.5-32B model, we annotate utility on the MS MARCO dataset and conduct retrieval experiments on MS MARCO and BEIR, as well as RAG experiments on MS MARCO QA, NQ, and HotpotQA. Our results show that LLM-generated annotations enhance out-of-domain retrieval performance and improve RAG outcomes compared to models trained solely on human annotations or downstream QA metrics. Furthermore, combining LLM annotations with just 20% of human labels achieves performance comparable to using full human annotations. Our study offers a comprehensive approach to utilizing LLM annotations for initializing QA systems on new corpora.

In web search scenarios, erroneous queries frequently degrade users’ experience through irrelevant results, underscoring the pivotal role of Chinese Spelling Check (CSC) systems. Although large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable capabilities across many tasks, they face critical challenges in the CSC scenario: (1) poor generalization to rare entities in open-domain searches, and (2) failure to adapt to temporal entity variations due to static parameters, resulting in serious over-correction issues. To tackle this, we present RACQC, a Chinese Query Correction system with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and multi-task learning. Specifically, our approach (1) integrates dynamic knowledge retrieval through entity-centric RAG to address rare entities and innovatively proposes an entity-title collaborative corpus, and (2) employs contrastive correction tasks to mitigate LLM over-correction tendencies. Furthermore, we propose MDCQC, a Multi-Domain Chinese Query Correction benchmark to test the model’s entity correction capabilities. Extensive experiments on several datasets show that RACQC significantly outperforms existing baselines in CSC tasks. Specifically, RACQC achieves a maximum improvement of +9.92% on the search scenario benchmark and +3.2% on the general-domain dataset under the F₁ metric.

Pre-training and fine-tuning framework has become the standard training paradigm for NLP tasks and is also widely used in industrial-level applications. However, there are still a limitation with this paradigm: simply fine-tuning with task-specific objectives tends to converge to local minima, resulting in a sub-optimal performance. In this paper, we first propose a new paradigm: knowledge rekindle, which aims to re-incorporate the fine-tuned expert model into the training cycle and break through the performance upper bounds of experts without introducing additional annotated data. Then we further propose a unified expert-guided pre-training (UEGP) framework for knowledge rekindle. Specifically, we reuse fine-tuned expert models for various downstream tasks as knowledge sources and inject task-specific prior knowledge to pre-trained language models (PLMs) by means of knowledge distillation. In this process, we perform multi-task learning with knowledge distillation and masked language modeling (MLM) objectives. We also further explored whether mixture-of-expert guided pre-training (MoEGP) can further enhance the effect of knowledge rekindle. Experiments and analysis on eight datasets in GLUE benchmark and a industrial-level search re-ranking dataset show the effectiveness of our method.

Pre-trained language models have become a crucial part of ranking systems and achieved very impressive effects recently. To maintain high performance while keeping efficient computations, knowledge distillation is widely used. In this paper, we focus on two key questions in knowledge distillation for ranking models: 1) how to ensemble knowledge from multi-teacher; 2) how to utilize the label information of data in the distillation process. We propose a unified algorithm called Pairwise Iterative Logits Ensemble (PILE) to tackle these two questions simultaneously. PILE ensembles multi-teacher logits supervised by label information in an iterative way and achieved competitive performance in both offline and online experiments. The proposed method has been deployed in a real-world commercial search system.