Guoliang Zhao

Author directory

2026

Long-context reasoning remains a critical challenge for Large Language Models (LLMs). Current research typically focuses on curating specialized training data by treating long-context reasoning as a monolithic task, yet it is challenging to verify its quality due to its internal cognitive complexity. In this paper, we propose a paradigm shift: viewing long-context reasoning as a hierarchical spectrum of core atomic skills. To operationalize this, we present an Anchor-based Reasoning (AbR) pipeline that automatically synthesizes strictly verifiable training data for each skill, thereby enabling reliable quality. Diagnostic analyses confirm that proficiency in these atomic skills strongly predicts general long-context reasoning performance. By training exclusively on a highly compact set of merely four thousand synthesized samples with Reinforcement Learning (RL), we explicitly sharpen these foundational capabilities. Extensive experiments across six challenging benchmarks demonstrate that this targeted RL causally delivers robust and generalizable performance gains, outperforming DeepSeek-R1-distill-32B by an average margin of 7.7% (improving from 46.3% to 54.0%). Furthermore, in-depth ablations reveal that these skills operate synergistically, establishing a scalable, data-efficient, and verifiable path to advancing long-context reasoning.
Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) has emerged as the dominant paradigm for parameter-efficient scaling and cost-effective deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, scaling laws developed for dense models are fundamentally inapplicable to MoE architectures, owing to three critical challenges: the multiplicity of governing factors, their intricate interdependencies, and the non-monotonic nature of their effects on model performance. These challenges collectively demand a rigorous and fine-grained investigation into MoE-specific scaling laws. In this work, we present a systematic decomposition of MoE configurations, identifying five key factors that influence model performance from both size and structural perspectives: data size (D), total model size (N), activated model size (Na), number of active experts (G), and ratio of shared experts (S). We conduct 450 controlled experiments to characterize the marginal effects of each factor, culminating in a comprehensive and precise joint MoE scaling law. Building on this foundation, we derive the theoretically optimal and practically efficiency-aware optimal configurations for G, S and Na/N with detailed analyses. Our findings reveal that the optimal settings for G and S are invariant to model and data size, while the optimal activation ratio Na/N grows sparser as N increases. Our proposed MoE scaling law provides accurate and insightful guidance for future MoE model design and training.
The matching paradigm is fundamental to large-scale information retrieval and is widely used in industrial search and advertising systems. Existing approaches employ Large Language Models (LLMs) primarily as feature extractors, underutilizing their full modeling capabilities. To address this limitation, we propose a novel matching paradigm, termed the Unified Generative and Discriminative LLM (UGD). It integrates two-tower, single-tower, and generative tasks within a unified LLM framework via attention-mask partitioning, enabling generative tasks to serve as auxiliary supervision for discriminative learning and facilitating distillation from single-tower to two-tower architectures through a multi-task fine-tuning mechanism. To satisfy online latency constraints, we further introduce a self-distillation variant of UGD with a KMeans-enhanced linearized RQVAE for prompt compression and quantization. This design compresses and quantizes landing-page documents during inference, improving serving efficiency and reducing storage overhead. Extensive experiments show that UGD achieves superior performance and strong practical value. The framework has been deployed in an industrial search engine serving hundreds of millions of users and hundreds of thousands of advertisers, significantly enhancing search experience. Open access upon publication.