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Hauptverfasser: Li, Weitao, Xiang, Boran, Wang, Xiaolong, Gou, Zhinan, Ma, Weizhi, Liu, Yang
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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Online-Zugang:https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06165
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author Li, Weitao
Xiang, Boran
Wang, Xiaolong
Gou, Zhinan
Ma, Weizhi
Liu, Yang
author_facet Li, Weitao
Xiang, Boran
Wang, Xiaolong
Gou, Zhinan
Ma, Weizhi
Liu, Yang
contents Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown strong capabilities through two complementary paradigms: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) for knowledge grounding and Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) for complex reasoning. However, existing attempts to unify these paradigms remain narrow in scope, typically limited to open-domain QA with fixed retrieval settings, which constrains generalization to broader domains. To address this limitation, we propose UR$^2$ (Unified RAG and Reasoning)), a general reinforcement learning framework that dynamically coordinates retrieval and reasoning. UR$^2$ introduces two key designs: a difficulty-aware curriculum that selectively invokes retrieval only for challenging instances, and a hybrid knowledge access strategy that combines domain-specific offline corpora with on-the-fly LLM-generated summaries. Together, these components mitigate the imbalance between retrieval and reasoning and improve robustness to noisy information. Experiments on open-domain QA, MMLU-Pro, medical, and mathematical reasoning tasks show that UR$^2$, built on Qwen-2.5-3/7B and LLaMA-3.1-8B, consistently outperforms existing RAG and RL baselines, and achieves performance comparable to GPT-4o-mini and GPT-4.1-mini on several benchmarks. Our code is available at https://github.com/Tsinghua-dhy/UR2.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_06165
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle UR$^2$: Unify RAG and Reasoning through Reinforcement Learning
Li, Weitao
Xiang, Boran
Wang, Xiaolong
Gou, Zhinan
Ma, Weizhi
Liu, Yang
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown strong capabilities through two complementary paradigms: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) for knowledge grounding and Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) for complex reasoning. However, existing attempts to unify these paradigms remain narrow in scope, typically limited to open-domain QA with fixed retrieval settings, which constrains generalization to broader domains. To address this limitation, we propose UR$^2$ (Unified RAG and Reasoning)), a general reinforcement learning framework that dynamically coordinates retrieval and reasoning. UR$^2$ introduces two key designs: a difficulty-aware curriculum that selectively invokes retrieval only for challenging instances, and a hybrid knowledge access strategy that combines domain-specific offline corpora with on-the-fly LLM-generated summaries. Together, these components mitigate the imbalance between retrieval and reasoning and improve robustness to noisy information. Experiments on open-domain QA, MMLU-Pro, medical, and mathematical reasoning tasks show that UR$^2$, built on Qwen-2.5-3/7B and LLaMA-3.1-8B, consistently outperforms existing RAG and RL baselines, and achieves performance comparable to GPT-4o-mini and GPT-4.1-mini on several benchmarks. Our code is available at https://github.com/Tsinghua-dhy/UR2.
title UR$^2$: Unify RAG and Reasoning through Reinforcement Learning
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06165