Optimizing Agentic Reasoning with Retrieval via Synthetic Semantic Information Gain Reward
Hong Kong JC STEM Lab of Smart City.（香港JC STEM实验室）；City University of Hong Kong.（香港城市大学）；Lingnan University（岭南大学）；Fudan University.（复旦大学）；Huazhong University of Science and Technology.（华中科技大学）
Senkang Hu, Yong Dai, Yuzhi Zhao, Yihang Tao, Yu Guo, Zhengru Fang, Sam Tak Wu Kwong, Yuguang Fang
Agentic reasoning enables large reasoning models (LRMs) to dynamically acquire external knowledge, but yet optimizing the retrieval process remains challenging due to the lack of dense, principled reward signals. In this paper, we introduce InfoReasoner, a unified framework that incentivizes effective information seeking via a synthetic semantic information gain reward. Theoretically, we redefine information gain as uncertainty reduction over the model's belief states, establishing guarantees, including non-negativity, telescoping additivity, and channel monotonicity. Practically, to enable scalable optimization without manual retrieval annotations, we propose an output-aware intrinsic estimator that computes information gain directly from the model's output distributions using semantic clustering via bidirectional textual entailment. This intrinsic reward guides the policy to maximize epistemic progress, enabling efficient training via Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). Experiments across seven question-answering benchmarks demonstrate that InfoReasoner consistently outperforms strong retrieval-augmented baselines, achieving up to 5.4% average accuracy improvement. Our work provides a theoretically grounded and scalable path toward agentic reasoning with retrieval. The code is available at https://github.com/dl-m9/InfoReasoner
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