Beyond Correctness: Rewarding Faithful Reasoning in Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Abstract: Inspired by the success of reinforcement learning (RL) in LLM training for domains like math and code, recent works have begun exploring how to train LLMs to use search engines more effectively as tools for retrieval-augmented generation. Although these methods achieve performance improvement across QA benchmarks, many prioritize final answer correctness while overlooking the quality of intermediate reasoning steps, which may lead to chain-of-thought unfaithfulness. In this paper, we first introduce a comprehensive evaluation framework for evaluating RL-based search agents, covering three distinct faithfulness metrics: information-think faithfulness, think-answer faithfulness, and think-search faithfulness. Our evaluations reveal that a prototypical RL-based search agent, Search-R1, has significant room for improvement in this regard. To foster faithful reasoning, we introduce VERITAS (Verifying Entailed Reasoning through Intermediate Traceability in Agentic Search), a novel framework that integrates fine-grained faithfulness rewards into the reinforcement learning process. Our experiments show that models trained with VERITAS not only significantly improve reasoning faithfulness, but also achieve comparable task performance across seven QA benchmarks.