Youru Li
2026
Learning from Contrasts: Synthesizing Reasoning Paths from Diverse Search Trajectories
Peiyang Liu | Zhirui Chen | Xi Wang | Di Liang | Youru Li | Zhi Cai | Wei Ye
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Peiyang Liu | Zhirui Chen | Xi Wang | Di Liang | Youru Li | Zhi Cai | Wei Ye
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
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.
NeuroSym-Cal: Bridging the Reasoning-Execution Gap in Code Generation via Hierarchical Calibration
Peiyang Liu | Yining Wang | Youru Li | Long Li | Zhi Cai | Wei Ye
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Peiyang Liu | Yining Wang | Youru Li | Long Li | Zhi Cai | Wei Ye
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
While Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning enhances code generation in Large Language Models (LLMs), it introduces a critical challenge in uncertainty estimation: Confidence Saturation. Existing calibration methods, such as Self-Consistency, rely on the assumption that consensus implies correctness. This assumption fails under systematic errors, where models confidently repeat flawed logic, leading to miscalibrated high-confidence predictions. To address this, we introduce NeuroSym-Cal, a hierarchical calibration framework. We posit that reliable confidence requires interrogating the model at two complementary levels: the extrinsic consensus of its symbolic outputs and the intrinsic sensitivity of its latent reasoning. Specifically, we propose Reasoning Sensitivity Analysis to measure the local curvature of the deductive process via latent perturbation, providing a fine-grained signal that persists even when output consensus saturates. These orthogonal features are fused by a Contextual Calibration Network to predict correctness. Experiments across state-of-the-art reasoning models (e.g., DeepSeek-R1) demonstrate that NeuroSym-Cal effectively de-saturates overconfident errors, achieving state-of-the-art Expected Calibration Error (ECE) and superior selective generation performance on Out-Of-Domain (OOD) benchmarks.