{"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/scent-of-knowledge-optimizing-search-enhanced","title":"Scent of Knowledge: Optimizing Search-Enhanced Reasoning with Information Foraging","arxiv_id":"2505.09316","date":"2025-05-14","proceeding":null,"authors":["Hongjin Qian","Zheng Liu"],"abstract":"Augmenting large language models (LLMs) with external retrieval has become a standard method to address their inherent knowledge cutoff limitations. However, traditional retrieval-augmented generation methods employ static, pre-inference retrieval strategies, making them inadequate for complex tasks involving ambiguous, multi-step, or evolving information needs. Recent advances in test-time scaling techniques have demonstrated significant potential in enabling LLMs to dynamically interact with external tools, motivating the shift toward adaptive inference-time retrieval. Inspired by Information Foraging Theory (IFT), we propose InForage, a reinforcement learning framework that formalizes retrieval-augmented reasoning as a dynamic information-seeking process. Unlike existing approaches, InForage explicitly rewards intermediate retrieval quality, encouraging LLMs to iteratively gather and integrate information through adaptive search behaviors. To facilitate training, we construct a human-guided dataset capturing iterative search and reasoning trajectories for complex, real-world web tasks. Extensive evaluations across general question answering, multi-hop reasoning tasks, and a newly developed real-time web QA dataset demonstrate InForage's superior performance over baseline methods. These results highlight InForage's effectiveness in building robust, adaptive, and efficient reasoning agents.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.09316v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.09316v1.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":"scent-of-knowledge-optimizing-search-enhanced","repo_url":"https://github.com/qhjqhj00/inforage","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"question-answering","task_name":"Question Answering"},{"task_slug":"retrieval","task_name":"Retrieval"},{"task_slug":"retrieval-augmented-generation","task_name":"Retrieval-augmented Generation"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2505.09316","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2505.09316"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+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. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/qhjqhj00/inforage","reach":null}],"summary":{"ran":1},"by_repo_kind":{"official":{"samples":1,"ran":1,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":0,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"4ec0bfd3b177dc55","entry":"TopicSearcher","repo":"qhjqhj00/inforage","repo_kind":"official","path":"annotation/topic_search.py","file_url":"https://github.com/qhjqhj00/inforage/blob/HEAD/annotation/topic_search.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran","verification_level":1,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":"deterministic","behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"Apache-2.0","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"4ec0bfd3b177dc55"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}