HAPRL: Human-Anchored Process Reinforcement Learning for Visual Search Agent

Multi-turn visual search agents answer questions about high-resolution images by iteratively deciding where to look. Reinforcement learning for these agents rewards only the final answer, leaving the search process unsupervised. Consequently, faulty routes in which the reasoning process is erroneous yet the final result is correct arise frequently, which in turn leads to ineffective training, i.e., scaling along the wrong paths. In this paper, we introduce HaPRL, the first framework to reinforce the search process with human search behavior. We first build an annotation platform and collect 1K+ human-annotated data with fine-grained behavioral signals. During training, a carefully designed judge scores each rollout with task-adaptive weights, anchored on the distilled trace of how a human annotator actually searched the same image. Extensive experiments show that HaPRL consistently outperforms outcome-based RL, and early-stage process supervision yields 6.7× more improvement in subsequent outcome-based scaling. Our results also demonstrate the importance of aligning model behavior with human process annotation signals, which offer new insight into the training of foundation models.