Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) benefit substantially from training on challenging competition-level questions. However, existing automated question synthesis methods lack precise difficulty control, incur high computational costs, and struggle to generate competition-level questions at scale. In this paper, we propose CoDiQ (Controllable Difficult Question Generation), a novel framework enabling fine-grained difficulty control via test-time scaling while ensuring question solvability. Specifically, first, we identify a test-time scaling tendency (extended reasoning token budget boosts difficulty but reduces solvability) and the intrinsic properties defining the upper bound of a model’s ability to generate valid, high-difficulty questions. Then, we develop CoDiQ-Generator from Qwen3-8B, which improves the upper bound of difficult question generation, making it particularly well-suited for challenging question construction. Building on the CoDiQ framework, we build CoDiQ-Corpus (44K competition-grade question sequences). Human evaluations show these questions are significantly more challenging than LiveCodeBench/AIME with over 82% solvability. Training LRMs on CoDiQ-Corpus substantially improves reasoning performance, verifying that scaling controlled-difficulty training questions enhances reasoning capabilities. We open-source CoDiQ-Corpus, CoDiQ-Generator, and implementations to support related research.

Multi-turn conversational Question Answering (ConvQA) is a practical task that requires the understanding of conversation history, such as previous QA pairs, the passage context, and current question. It can be applied to a variety of scenarios with human-machine dialogue. The major challenge of this task is to require the model to consider the relevant conversation history while understanding the passage. Existing methods usually simply prepend the history to the current question, or use the complicated mechanism to model the history. This article proposes an impression feature, which use the word-level inter attention mechanism to learn multi-oriented information from conversation history to the input sequence, including attention from history tokens to each token of the input sequence, and history turn inter attention from different history turns to each token of the input sequence, and self-attention within input sequence, where the input sequence contains a current question and a passage. Then a feature selection method is designed to enhance the useful history turns of conversation and weaken the unnecessary information. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method on the QuAC dataset, analyze the impact of different feature selection methods, and verify the validity and reliability of the proposed features through visualization and human evaluation.