Improving Search Agent with One Line of Code

Deep search agents operate over trajectories spanning dozens of steps, yet standard reinforcement learning provides only a single outcome reward per trajectory, which is far too sparse for effective credit assignment. On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) addresses this by using the model's own logits as dense token-level teachers, but extending it to search agents introduces a fundamental tension: the teacher, having access to privileged information such as the correct answer, produces a distribution that differs systematically from the student's exploration-based reasoning, and naive distillation causes the student to inherit this information asymmetry rather than learn better search strategies. We resolve this tension through two contributions. First, we construct Evidence Anchors, which are concise, step-level evidence snippets extracted from the web, as privileged information that captures key reasoning steps without revealing the entire answer path. Second, we propose Step-Level Self-Distilled Policy Optimization (SSPO), which converts teacher-student disagreement into step-level advantage weights within GRPO, applied exclusively to incorrect trajectories. This design decouples what to update from how much to update: the outcome reward determines the direction of policy change, while the teacher modulates its magnitude at each step. Correct trajectories are left untouched, preserving their diversity. On Qwen3-8B, SSPO consistently outperforms GRPO across BrowseComp, GAIA, and FRAMES, surpassing or matching GRPO trained with twice as many gradient steps while adding only about 5 percent overhead per step from a single additional forward pass.

Search agents extend Large Language Models (LLMs) beyond static parametric knowledge by enabling access to up-to-date and long-tail information unavailable during pretraining. While reinforcement learning has been widely adopted for training such agents, existing approaches face key limitations: process supervision often suffers from unstable value estimation, whereas outcome supervision struggles with credit assignment due to sparse, trajectory-level rewards. To bridge this gap, we propose Contribution-Weighted GRPO (CW-GRPO), a framework that integrates process supervision into group relative policy optimization. Instead of directly optimizing process rewards, CW-GRPO employs an LLM judge to assess the retrieval utility and reasoning correctness at each search round, producing per-round contribution scores. These scores are used to rescale outcome-based advantages along the trajectory, enabling fine-grained credit assignment without sacrificing optimization stability. Experiments on multiple knowledge-intensive benchmarks show that CW-GRPO outperforms standard GRPO by 5.0% on Qwen3-8B and 6.3% on Qwen3-1.7B, leading to more effective search behaviors. Additional analysis reveals that successful trajectories exhibit concentrated contributions in specific rounds, providing empirical insight into search agent tasks.

Post-training has become the dominant recipe for turning a language model into a competent search-augmented reasoning agent. A line of recent work pushes its performance further by adding elaborate machinery on top of this standard pipeline. These augmentations import external supervision from stronger external systems, attach auxiliary modules such as process reward models or retrospective critics, restructure the rollout itself with tree search or multi-stage curricula, or shape the reward with hand-crafted bonuses and penalties. Each addition delivers a measurable gain, but each also inflates the training pipeline and ties the recipe to resources or designs that may not always be available. We take a step back and ask whether any of this machinery is actually necessary, and propose Search-E1, a self-evolution method that lets a search-augmented agent improve through only vanilla GRPO interleaved with on-policy self-distillation (OPSD). After each GRPO round, the policy rolls out on its own training questions. A token-level forward KL objective then aligns the policy's inference-time distribution to its own distribution under a privileged context that exposes a more efficient sibling trajectory. Despite this simplicity, the procedure naturally provides dense per-step supervision. On seven QA benchmarks, Search-E1 reaches 0.440 average EM with Qwen2.5-3B, surpassing all open-source baselines at both scales. Code and complete version will be made public soon.