{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/o-2-searcher-a-searching-based-agent-model","title":"O$^2$-Searcher: A Searching-based Agent Model for Open-Domain Open-Ended Question Answering","arxiv_id":"2505.16582","date":"2025-05-22","proceeding":null,"authors":["Jianbiao Mei","Tao Hu","Daocheng Fu","Licheng Wen","Xuemeng Yang","Rong Wu","Pinlong Cai","Xing Gao","Yu Yang","Chengjun Xie","Botian Shi","Yong liu","Yu Qiao"],"abstract":"Large Language Models (LLMs), despite their advancements, are fundamentally limited by their static parametric knowledge, hindering performance on tasks requiring open-domain up-to-date information. While enabling LLMs to interact with external knowledge environments is a promising solution, current efforts primarily address closed-end problems. Open-ended questions, which characterized by lacking a standard answer or providing non-unique and diverse answers, remain underexplored. To bridge this gap, we present O$^2$-Searcher, a novel search agent leveraging reinforcement learning to effectively tackle both open-ended and closed-ended questions in the open domain. O$^2$-Searcher leverages an efficient, locally simulated search environment for dynamic knowledge acquisition, effectively decoupling the external world knowledge from model's sophisticated reasoning processes. It employs a unified training mechanism with meticulously designed reward functions, enabling the agent to identify problem types and adapt different answer generation strategies. Furthermore, to evaluate performance on complex open-ended tasks, we construct O$^2$-QA, a high-quality benchmark featuring 300 manually curated, multi-domain open-ended questions with associated web page caches. Extensive experiments show that O$^2$-Searcher, using only a 3B model, significantly surpasses leading LLM agents on O$^2$-QA. It also achieves SOTA results on various closed-ended QA benchmarks against similarly-sized models, while performing on par with much larger ones.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.16582v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.16582v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"o-2-searcher-a-searching-based-agent-model","repo_url":"https://github.com/acade-mate/o2-searcher","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"MIT"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"answer-generation","task_name":"Answer Generation"},{"task_slug":"open-question","task_name":"Open-Ended Question Answering"},{"task_slug":"question-answering","task_name":"Question Answering"},{"task_slug":"world-knowledge","task_name":"World Knowledge"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":"https://syntology.ai/paper/2505.16582","atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2505.16582","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2505.16582"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-25T09:33:49+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. 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