ParallelSearch: Train your LLMs to Decompose Query and Search Sub-queries in Parallel with Reinforcement Learning

Fuente: arXiv
Salvato in:
Dettagli Bibliografici
Autori principali: Zhao, Shu, Yu, Tan, Xu, Anbang, Singh, Japinder, Shukla, Aaditya, Akkiraju, Rama
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
Soggetti:
Accesso online:
Tags: Aggiungi Tag
Nessun Tag, puoi essere il primo ad aggiungerne!!
_version_ 1866916895653888000
author Zhao, Shu
Yu, Tan
Xu, Anbang
Singh, Japinder
Shukla, Aaditya
Akkiraju, Rama
author_facet Zhao, Shu
Yu, Tan
Xu, Anbang
Singh, Japinder
Shukla, Aaditya
Akkiraju, Rama
contents Reasoning-augmented search agents such as Search-R1, trained via reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR), demonstrate remarkable capabilities in multi-step information retrieval from external knowledge sources. These agents address the limitations of their parametric memory by dynamically gathering relevant facts to address complex reasoning tasks. However, existing approaches suffer from a fundamental architectural limitation: they process search queries strictly sequentially, even when handling inherently parallelizable and logically independent comparisons. This sequential bottleneck significantly constrains computational efficiency, particularly for queries that require multiple entity comparisons. To address this critical limitation, we propose ParallelSearch, a novel reinforcement learning framework that empowers large language models (LLMs) to recognize parallelizable query structures and execute multiple search operations concurrently. Our approach introduces dedicated reward functions that incentivize the identification of independent query components while preserving answer accuracy through jointly considering correctness, query decomposition quality, and parallel execution benefits. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that ParallelSearch outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by an average performance gain of 2.9% across seven question-answering benchmarks. Notably, on parallelizable questions, our method achieves a 12.7% performance improvement while requiring only 69.6% of the LLM calls compared to sequential approaches.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_09303
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle ParallelSearch: Train your LLMs to Decompose Query and Search Sub-queries in Parallel with Reinforcement Learning
Zhao, Shu
Yu, Tan
Xu, Anbang
Singh, Japinder
Shukla, Aaditya
Akkiraju, Rama
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Information Retrieval
Reasoning-augmented search agents such as Search-R1, trained via reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR), demonstrate remarkable capabilities in multi-step information retrieval from external knowledge sources. These agents address the limitations of their parametric memory by dynamically gathering relevant facts to address complex reasoning tasks. However, existing approaches suffer from a fundamental architectural limitation: they process search queries strictly sequentially, even when handling inherently parallelizable and logically independent comparisons. This sequential bottleneck significantly constrains computational efficiency, particularly for queries that require multiple entity comparisons. To address this critical limitation, we propose ParallelSearch, a novel reinforcement learning framework that empowers large language models (LLMs) to recognize parallelizable query structures and execute multiple search operations concurrently. Our approach introduces dedicated reward functions that incentivize the identification of independent query components while preserving answer accuracy through jointly considering correctness, query decomposition quality, and parallel execution benefits. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that ParallelSearch outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by an average performance gain of 2.9% across seven question-answering benchmarks. Notably, on parallelizable questions, our method achieves a 12.7% performance improvement while requiring only 69.6% of the LLM calls compared to sequential approaches.
title ParallelSearch: Train your LLMs to Decompose Query and Search Sub-queries in Parallel with Reinforcement Learning
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09303