Yongqi Wang

Jinyi Han, Zixiang Di, Zishang Jiang et al.

Large language models (LLMs) achieve strong performance by generating long chains of thought, but longer traces always introduce redundant or ineffective reasoning steps. One typical behavior is that they often perform unnecessary verification and revisions even if they have reached the correct answers. This limitation stems from the unstructured nature of reasoning trajectories and the lack of targeted supervision for critical reasoning abilities. To address this, we propose Structured Reasoning (SCR), a framework that decouples reasoning trajectories into explicit, evaluable, and trainable components. We mainly implement SCR using a Generate-Verify-Revise paradigm. Specifically, we construct structured training data and apply Dynamic Termination Supervision to guide the model in deciding when to terminate reasoning. To avoid interference between learning signals for different reasoning abilities, we adopt a progressive two-stage reinforcement learning strategy: the first stage targets initial generation and self-verification, and the second stage focuses on revision. Extensive experiments on three backbone models show that SCR substantially improves reasoning efficiency and self-verification. Besides, compared with existing reasoning paradigms, it reduces output token length by up to 50%.

Zixiang Di, Jinyi Han, Shuo Zhang et al.

Learning from negative samples holds great promise for improving Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning capability, yet existing methods treat all incorrect responses as equally informative, overlooking the crucial role of sample quality. To address this, we propose Plausible Negative Samples (PNS), a method that synthesizes high-quality negative samples exhibiting expected format and structural coherence while ultimately yielding incorrect answers. PNS trains a dedicated model via reverse reinforcement learning (RL) guided by a composite reward combining format compliance, accuracy inversion, reward model assessment, and chain-of-thought evaluation, generating responses nearly indistinguishable from correct solutions. We further validate PNS as a plug-and-play data source for preference optimization across three backbone models on seven mathematical reasoning benchmarks. Results demonstrate that PNS consistently outperforms other negative sample synthesis methods, achieving an average improvement of 2.03% over RL-trained models.

Yongqi Wang, Xiaofeng Ji, Jie Wang et al.

Adapting Large Language Models (LLMs) to specialized domains without human-annotated data is a crucial yet formidable challenge. Widely adopted knowledge distillation methods often devolve into coarse-grained mimicry, where the student model inefficiently targets its own weaknesses and risks inheriting the teacher's reasoning flaws. This exposes a critical pedagogical dilemma: how to devise a reliable curriculum when the teacher itself is not an infallible expert. Our work resolves this by capitalizing on a key insight: while LLMs may exhibit fallibility in complex, holistic reasoning, they often exhibit high fidelity on focused, atomic sub-problems. Based on this, we propose Divergence-Guided Reasoning Curriculum (DGRC), which constructs a learning path from atomic knowledge to reasoning chains by dynamically deriving two complementary curricula from disagreements in reasoning pathways. When a student and teacher produce conflicting results, DGRC directs the teacher to perform a diagnostic analysis: it analyzes both reasoning paths to formulate atomic queries that target the specific points of divergence, and then self-answers these queries to create high-confidence atomic question-answer pairs. These pairs then serve a dual purpose: (1) providing an atomic curriculum to rectify the student's knowledge gaps, and (2) serving as factual criteria to filter the teacher's original reasoning chains, yielding a verified CoT curriculum that teaches the student how to integrate atomic knowledge into complete reasoning paths. Experiments across the medical and legal domains on student models of various sizes demonstrate the effectiveness of our DGRC framework. Notably, our method achieves a 7.76% relative improvement for the 1.5B student model in the medical domain over strong unlabeled baseline.