From Evidence to Trajectory: Abductive Reasoning Path Synthesis for Training Retrieval-Augmented Generation Agents
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| Main Authors: | , , , , , , , , , |
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2025
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| _version_ | 1866915519025643520 |
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| author | Li, Muzhi Qi, Jinhu Wu, Yihong Zhao, Minghao Ma, Liheng Li, Yifan Wang, Xinyu Zhang, Yingxue Leung, Ho-fung King, Irwin |
| author_facet | Li, Muzhi Qi, Jinhu Wu, Yihong Zhao, Minghao Ma, Liheng Li, Yifan Wang, Xinyu Zhang, Yingxue Leung, Ho-fung King, Irwin |
| contents | Retrieval-augmented generation agents development is hindered by the lack of process-level supervision to effectively guide agentic capabilities like task decomposition, retriever invocation, and stepwise decision-making. While reinforcement learning offers a potential solution, it suffers from sparse rewards and the limited reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). Meanwhile, existing data synthesis methods only produce chain-of-thought rationales and fail to model environmental interactions. In this paper, we propose EviPath, an evidence-anchored reasoning path synthesis paradigm for RAG agent development. EviPath comprises: (i) Abductive Subtask Planning, which decomposes the problem into sub-questions and iteratively plans an optimal solution path based on the dependencies between them; (ii) Faithful Sub-question Answering, which uses supporting evidence to construct a proxy environment to generate reasoning thoughts and answers for each sub-question; and (iii) Conversational Fine-Tuning, which formats the complete agent-environment interaction trajectory into a dialogue format suitable for Supervised Fine-Tuning. EviPath allows LLMs to learn complex reasoning and tool-use capabilities directly from synthesized data. Extensive experiments on widely-used question-answering benchmarks show that an 8B parameter model trained with EviPath-synthesized data significantly and consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines with a double-digit absolute EM gain of 14.7% in open-domain question answering. |
| format | Preprint |
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arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_23071 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | From Evidence to Trajectory: Abductive Reasoning Path Synthesis for Training Retrieval-Augmented Generation Agents Li, Muzhi Qi, Jinhu Wu, Yihong Zhao, Minghao Ma, Liheng Li, Yifan Wang, Xinyu Zhang, Yingxue Leung, Ho-fung King, Irwin Computation and Language Artificial Intelligence Retrieval-augmented generation agents development is hindered by the lack of process-level supervision to effectively guide agentic capabilities like task decomposition, retriever invocation, and stepwise decision-making. While reinforcement learning offers a potential solution, it suffers from sparse rewards and the limited reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). Meanwhile, existing data synthesis methods only produce chain-of-thought rationales and fail to model environmental interactions. In this paper, we propose EviPath, an evidence-anchored reasoning path synthesis paradigm for RAG agent development. EviPath comprises: (i) Abductive Subtask Planning, which decomposes the problem into sub-questions and iteratively plans an optimal solution path based on the dependencies between them; (ii) Faithful Sub-question Answering, which uses supporting evidence to construct a proxy environment to generate reasoning thoughts and answers for each sub-question; and (iii) Conversational Fine-Tuning, which formats the complete agent-environment interaction trajectory into a dialogue format suitable for Supervised Fine-Tuning. EviPath allows LLMs to learn complex reasoning and tool-use capabilities directly from synthesized data. Extensive experiments on widely-used question-answering benchmarks show that an 8B parameter model trained with EviPath-synthesized data significantly and consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines with a double-digit absolute EM gain of 14.7% in open-domain question answering. |
| title | From Evidence to Trajectory: Abductive Reasoning Path Synthesis for Training Retrieval-Augmented Generation Agents |
| topic | Computation and Language Artificial Intelligence |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.23071 |