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ARBOR: Online Process Rewards via a Reusable Rubric Buffer for Search Agents

Zheng Liu, Longxiang Zhang, Xintong Wang, Zhiang Xu, Shaoxiong Zhan, Xin Shan, Wen Huang, Tao Dai et al.

arXiv, 2026

Abstract

LLM-based search agents are trained predominantly with outcome-only reward, leaving the search process itself unsupervised. This signal degenerates on outcome-homogeneous groups where all sampled trajectories share the same correctness, yielding zero within-group advantage and no gradient. Existing process supervision either trains a costly verifier or generates per-query rubrics that are inconsistent across queries and discarded after one use. We propose ARBOR (Adaptive Rubric Buffer for Online Reward), a reusable process-reward framework that maintains a rubric memory shared across queries. Query-local drafts induced from contrastive trajectories are admitted, consolidated into cross-query common rubrics, and retired as the policy evolves. A small active subset of common rubrics scores trajectories via sparse pairwise judging, and the resulting scores are added to the base reward, providing process-level gradient even when outcome reward is uniform. ARBOR consistently outperforms GRPO and DAPO baselines on four multi-hop QA benchmarks, raising average LLM-judge accuracy by up to 4.2 points and converting up to 42% of otherwise-zero-gradient training groups into informative ones.

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