Zhirui Chen


2026

Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) has been widely used for automated reasoning data exploration, but current supervision extraction methods remain inefficient. Standard approaches retain only the single highest-reward trajectory, discarding the comparative signals present in the many explored paths. Here we introduce Contrastive Reasoning Path Synthesis (CRPS), a framework that transforms supervision extraction from a filtering process into a synthesis procedure. CRPS uses a structured reflective process to analyze the differences between high- and low-quality search trajectories, extracting explicit information about strategic pivots and local failure modes. These insights guide the synthesis of reasoning chains that incorporate success patterns while avoiding identified pitfalls. We show empirically that models fine-tuned on just 60K CRPS-synthesized examples match or exceed the performance of baselines trained on 590K examples derived from standard rejection sampling, a 20× reduction in dataset size. Furthermore, CRPS improves generalization on out-of-domain benchmarks, demonstrating that learning from the contrast between success and failure produces more transferable reasoning capabilities than learning from success alone.

2025

Despite significant progress, large language models (LLMs) still struggle with long contexts due to memory limitations and their inability to tackle complex and long-context tasks. Additionally, LLMs often suffer from a lack of transparency and are prone to producing hallucinations. To address these challenges, we propose JERR, a novel framework designed to enhance long-context comprehension via graph-based reasoning in LLMs. JERR integrates three key components: synopsis extraction, graph construction, and relational reasoning. First, synopsis is extracted by chunking text strategically, allowing the model to summarize and understand information more efficiently. Second, we build a directed acyclic graph (DAG) to resolve redundancy, ensuring logical consistency and clarity. Finally, we incorporate Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to help the model navigate complex reasoning paths, ensuring more accurate and interpretable outputs. This framework provides a novel solution that enables LLMs to handle extended contexts and complex reasoning tasks with improved reliability and transparency. Experimental results show that JERR consistently outperforms all baselines on the ROUGE and F1 metrics, achieving the highest scores on the LLM-Rater evaluation.