CoEM introduces a Commit-on-Evidence Memory system that learns when to compress source evidence into compact memory facts while preserving potentially useful excerpts verbatim in a pending set. The system uses a learned policy to decide whether to promote, retain, or discard each pending excerpt as new context arrives, and a frozen verifier ensures only supported facts are committed. Reinforcement learning trains this policy with step-level evidence rewards and final answer rewards, leading to consistent improvements in long-context reasoning, achieving 10.4–11.4 F1 points over the strongest baseline on 6,400-document inputs.
By Jingguang Li, Yebo Wu, Zuyi Guo, Kailang Ma, Xianjie Dai, Han Zheng, Benwang Chen, Li Li, Can Rong, Heye Huang
arXiv:2608. 06128v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Search agents extend large language models beyond static parametric memory by enabling them to acquire and use ex ternal evidence during multi-step reasoning.
By Xingyu Guo, Wei Chen, Linlin Yang, Baochang Zhang
arXiv:2606. 18831v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Long-context reasoning is an essential capability for large language models, particularly when they are deployed as autonomous agents that must reason over lengthy trajectories.
By Xiaoyue Xu, Sikui Zhang, Xiaorong Wang, Xu Han, Chaojun Xiao
Understanding and reasoning over long contexts has become a key requirement for deploying large language models (LLMs) in realistic applications. Although recent LLMs support increasingly long context windows, they often fail to use relevant evidence that is already present in the input, revealing a gap between context access and effective context utilization.
The paper investigates how reinforcement learning can cause large language model agents to adopt shortcut policies for tool use, relying on superficial prompt cues rather than actual task needs. By creating synthetic environments that mix factual QA and math reasoning, the authors show that agents often invoke tools when cues are present, even when those tools are unnecessary, with spurious invocation rates rising up to 39%. They find that shortcut learning occurs mainly when agents have already mastered the target tool and that semantic alignment between cues and tools amplifies the effect. To counter this, they propose a dense, decision-level reward where an LLM judge assesses tool necessity, which reduces cue-driven tool use while maintaining performance.
By Yiwei Yang, Haoxiang Zhang, Bingbing Wen, Yao Lu, Yuchen Wu, Lei Zhang, Julian McAuley, Pan Lu, Bill Howe
arXiv:2607. 02509v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Understanding and reasoning over long contexts has become a key requirement for deploying large language models (LLMs) in realistic applications.
By Yanjun Zhao, Ruizhong Qiu, Tianxin Wei, Yuanchen Bei, Zhining Liu, Lingjie Chen, Ismini Lourentzou, Hanghang Tong, Jingrui He
StateTree is a reinforcement learning approach that improves long‑term dialogue reasoning by building a tree‑structured auxiliary task from limited dialogue data. The method embeds key‑value records across multiple sessions into a binary tree, requiring the model to traverse from root to leaf, retrieve records, compare timestamps, and identify a target question among distractors. Curriculum RL training increases tree depth, and a compositional variant trains the model to combine partial reasoning fragments, enabling cross‑session retrieval, temporal reasoning, knowledge updates, and multi‑hop reasoning while generalizing from 10K‑token to 128K‑token contexts.
By Naen Xu, Wanqing Cui, Yibo Hu, Shixin Hong, Hengyu An, Meiguang Jin, Junfeng Ma, Tianyu Du
arXiv:2607. 06160v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Synthesizing long-context supervised fine-tuning (SFT) data is a scalable way to enhance the long-context understanding of large language models (LLMs), yet existing approaches share three limitations: narrow task coverage, insufficient instruction difficulty, and a lack of faithfulness supervision.
By Chenhao Yuan, Yinhao Xu, Shuwen Xu, Xizhi Yang, Jiaxiang Liu, Chenxi Zhou, Shaoping Huang, Haolin Ren, Pengfei Cao, Jun Zhao, Kang Liu
arXiv:2605. 28742v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Language models can use verifiable rewards to improve at a wide variety of reasoning tasks.
By Linas Nasvytis, Simon Jerome Han, Ben Prystawski, Satchel Grant, Noah D. Goodman, Judith E. Fan
arXiv:2604. 01161v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) exhibiting test-time scaling behavior, such as extended reasoning traces and self-verification, have demonstrated remarkable performance on complex, long-term reasoning tasks.
By Gleb Rodionov, Roman Garipov, George Yakushev
arXiv:2510. 13554v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The reasoning pattern of Large language models (LLMs) remains opaque, and reinforcement learning (RL) typically applies uniform credit across an entire generation, blurring the distinction between pivotal and routine steps.
By Yang Li, Zhichen Dong, Yuhan Sun, Weixun Wang, Shaopan Xiong, Yijia Luo, Jiashun Liu, Han Lu, Jiamang Wang, Wenbo Su, Bo Zheng, Junchi Yan
GRACE is a step‑level benchmark for evaluating the faithfulness of chain‑of‑thought reasoning over context. It provides human annotations for each step in CoT traces from 10 models across 4 datasets, labeling faithfulness, error category, and natural‑language explanations. The benchmark introduces a data‑driven taxonomy that splits errors into GRACE‑Inference (deductive) and GRACE‑Grounding (factual) tracks, each with four categories, and demonstrates that incorporating step‑level faithfulness signals can improve downstream accuracy and reasoning reliability.
By Hoang Pham, Dong Le, Anh Tuan Luu