Chenrui Fan


2025

pdf bib
Understanding the Thinking Process of Reasoning Models: A Perspective from Schoenfeld’s Episode Theory
Ming Li | Nan Zhang | Chenrui Fan | Hong Jiao | Yanbin Fu | Sydney Peters | Qingshu Xu | Robert Lissitz | Tianyi Zhou
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

While Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) generate extensive chain-of-thought reasoning, we lack a principled framework for understanding how these thoughts are structured. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach by applying Schoenfeld’s Episode Theory, a classic cognitive framework for human mathematical problem-solving, to analyze the reasoning traces of LRMs. We annotated thousands of sentences and paragraphs from model-generated solutions to math problems using seven cognitive labels (e.g., Plan, Implement, Verify). The result is the first publicly available benchmark for the fine-grained analysis of machine reasoning, including a large annotated corpus and detailed annotation guidebooks. Our preliminary analysis reveals distinct patterns in LRM reasoning, such as the transition dynamics between cognitive states. This framework provides a theoretically grounded methodology for interpreting LRM cognition and enables future work on more controllable and transparent reasoning systems.

2024

pdf bib
1+1>2: Can Large Language Models Serve as Cross-Lingual Knowledge Aggregators?
Yue Huang | Chenrui Fan | Yuan Li | Siyuan Wu | Tianyi Zhou | Xiangliang Zhang | Lichao Sun
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Large Language Models (LLMs) have garnered significant attention due to their remarkable ability to process information across various languages. Despite their capabilities, they exhibit inconsistencies in handling identical queries in different languages, presenting challenges for further advancement. This paper introduces a method to enhance the multilingual performance of LLMs by aggregating knowledge from diverse languages. This approach incorporates a low-resource knowledge detector specific to a language, a strategic language selection process, and mechanisms for answer replacement and integration. Our extensive experiments demonstrate notable performance improvements, particularly in reducing the performance disparity across languages. An ablation study confirms that each component of our method significantly contributes to these enhancements. This research highlights the inherent potential of LLMs to harmonize multilingual capabilities and offers valuable insights for further exploration.