Making Long-Context Language Models Better Multi-Hop Reasoners
Yanyang Li, Shuo Liang, Michael R. Lyu, Liwei Wang
Abstract
Recent advancements in long-context modeling have enhanced language models (LMs) for complex tasks across multiple NLP applications. Despite this progress, we find that these models struggle with multi-hop reasoning and exhibit decreased performance in the presence of noisy contexts. In this paper, we introduce Reasoning with Attributions, a novel approach that prompts LMs to supply attributions for each assertion during their reasoning. We validate our approach through experiments on three multi-hop datasets, employing both proprietary and open-source models, and demonstrate its efficacy and resilience. Furthermore, we explore methods to augment reasoning capabilities via fine-tuning and offer an attribution-annotated dataset and a specialized training strategy. Our fine-tuned model achieves competitive performance on multi-hop reasoning benchmarks, closely paralleling proprietary LMs such as ChatGPT and Claude-instant 1 .
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Cited by top-tier papers13
- LoongRL: Reinforcement Learning for Advanced Reasoning over Long ContextsSiyuan Wang, Gaokai Zhang, Li Lyna Zhang, Ning Shang et al.ICLR 2026 · 28 citations
- POSITION BIAS MITIGATES POSITION BIAS: Mitigate Position Bias Through Inter-Position Knowledge DistillationYifei Wang, Feng Xiong, Yong Wang, Linjing Li et al.EMNLP 2025 · 16 citations
- Attribution, Citation, and Quotation: A Survey of Evidence-based Text Generation with Large Language ModelsTobias Schreieder, Tim Schopf, Michael FärberACL 2026 · 10 citations
- SoLoPO: Unlocking Long-Context Capabilities in LLMs via Short-to-Long Preference OptimizationHuashan Sun, Shengyi Liao, Yansen Han, Yu Bai et al.ICLR 2026 · 9 citations
- Chunks as Arms: Multi-Armed Bandit-Guided Sampling for Long-Context LLM Preference OptimizationShaohua Duan, Pengcheng Huang, Xinze Li, Zhenghao Liu et al.ACL 2026 · 7 citations
Builds on18
- Language Models are Few-Shot LearnersTom B. Brown, Benjamin Mann, Nick Ryder, Melanie Subbiah et al.NeurIPS 2020 · 64,255 citations
- Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language ModelsJason Wei, Xuezhi Wang, Dale Schuurmans, Maarten Bosma et al.NeurIPS 2022 · 22,562 citations
- Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP TasksPatrick Lewis, Ethan Perez, Aleksandra Piktus, Fabio Petroni et al.NeurIPS 2020 · 19,162 citations
- LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language ModelsEdward J. Hu, Yelong Shen, Phillip Wallis, Zeyuan Allen-Zhu et al.ICLR 2022 · 18,833 citations
- Large Language Models Can Be Easily Distracted by Irrelevant ContextFreda Shi, Xinyun Chen, Kanishka Misra, Nathan Scales et al.ICML 2023 · 970 citations
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