PaperSearchQA: Learning to Search and Reason over Scientific Papers with RLVR

James Burgess, Jan N. Hansen, Duo Peng, Yuhui Zhang, Alejandro Lozano +3 more
1/26/2026
cs.LGcs.AIcs.CL

No confident code implementation found for this paper. 1 possible match can be shown below.

Abstract

Search agents are language models (LMs) that reason and search knowledge bases (or the web) to answer questions; recent methods supervise only the final answer accuracy using reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR). Most RLVR search agents tackle general-domain QA, which limits their relevance to technical AI systems in science, engineering, and medicine. In this work we propose training agents to search and reason over scientific papers -- this tests technical question-answering, it is directly relevant to real scientists, and the capabilities will be crucial to future AI Scientist systems. Concretely, we release a search corpus of 16 million biomedical paper abstracts and construct a challenging factoid QA dataset called PaperSearchQA with 60k samples answerable from the corpus, along with benchmarks. We train search agents in this environment to outperform non-RL retrieval baselines; we also perform further quantitative analysis and observe interesting agent behaviors like planning, reasoning, and self-verification. Our corpus, datasets, and benchmarks are usable with the popular Search-R1 codebase for RLVR training and released on https://huggingface.co/collections/jmhb/papersearchqa. Finally, our data creation methods are scalable and easily extendable to other scientific domains.

View on arXivView PDF

Code Implementations

No confident code match yet

We couldn't find an author-owned or strongly-evidenced community implementation for this paper. 1 weaker match is hidden by default — verify before relying on them.

No code implementations found yet.

Know of an implementation? Let us know in the comments below!

Similar Papers

Cite this paper

@article{burgess2026papersearchqa,
  title  = {PaperSearchQA: Learning to Search and Reason over Scientific Papers with RLVR},
  author = {James Burgess and Jan N. Hansen and Duo Peng and Yuhui Zhang and Alejandro Lozano and Min Woo Sun and Emma Lundberg and Serena Yeung-Levy},
  year   = {2026},
  eprint = {2601.18207},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url    = {http://arxiv.org/abs/2601.18207v1}
}

Add a badge to your README

Shows whether official code is linked for this paper.

Code of Paper badge
[![Code of Paper](https://codeofpaper.com/badge/2601.18207.svg)](https://codeofpaper.com/paper/2601.18207)

Discussion