CAFE框架通过协同进化的反馈机制,显著提升了搜索代理的性能,值得关注。
CAFE框架通过共享参数模型交替搜索代理和评论员角色,实现在线和离线优化。在七个代理搜索基准上,CAFE平均优于评估的基于RL的搜索代理,并在所有六个域外基准上保持其优势,同时减少了答案级别的幻觉。
CAFE: Self-Improving Search Agents Need Co-Evolving Feedback
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.