ChatR1: Reinforcement Learning for Conversational Reasoning and Retrieval Augmented Question Answering

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Hauptverfasser: Lupart, Simon, Aliannejadi, Mohammad, Kanoulas, Evangelos
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Lupart, Simon
Aliannejadi, Mohammad
Kanoulas, Evangelos
author_facet Lupart, Simon
Aliannejadi, Mohammad
Kanoulas, Evangelos
contents We present ChatR1, a reasoning framework based on reinforcement learning (RL) for conversational question answering (CQA). Reasoning plays an important role in CQA, where user intent evolves across dialogue turns, and utterances are often underspecified, requiring contextual interpretation, query reformulation, and dynamic coordination between retrieval and generation. Unlike static `rewrite, retrieve, and generate' pipelines, ChatR1 interleaves search and reasoning across turns, enabling exploratory and adaptive behaviors learned through RL. To address the challenge of sparse and delayed rewards in RL, we propose an intent-aware reward that provides turn-level feedback by aligning retrieval and reasoning with evolving user goals. ChatR1 demonstrates strong performance on both 3B and 7B model backbones, outperforming competitive models on five CQA datasets, measured by different metrics (F1, BERTScore, and LLM-as-judge). We include a diverse set of CQA datasets to cover topic shifts, evolving intents, mixed-initiative dialogues, and multi-document grounding, testing ChatR1's performance from various aspects. Ablation studies confirm the effectiveness of the intent-aware reward. Our analyses further reveal diverse reasoning trajectories and effective use of the search tool. ChatR1 also generalizes robustly across domains, demonstrating that RL-based reasoning enables more flexible and context-aware behavior than static CQA pipelines.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_13312
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle ChatR1: Reinforcement Learning for Conversational Reasoning and Retrieval Augmented Question Answering
Lupart, Simon
Aliannejadi, Mohammad
Kanoulas, Evangelos
Computation and Language
Information Retrieval
We present ChatR1, a reasoning framework based on reinforcement learning (RL) for conversational question answering (CQA). Reasoning plays an important role in CQA, where user intent evolves across dialogue turns, and utterances are often underspecified, requiring contextual interpretation, query reformulation, and dynamic coordination between retrieval and generation. Unlike static `rewrite, retrieve, and generate' pipelines, ChatR1 interleaves search and reasoning across turns, enabling exploratory and adaptive behaviors learned through RL. To address the challenge of sparse and delayed rewards in RL, we propose an intent-aware reward that provides turn-level feedback by aligning retrieval and reasoning with evolving user goals. ChatR1 demonstrates strong performance on both 3B and 7B model backbones, outperforming competitive models on five CQA datasets, measured by different metrics (F1, BERTScore, and LLM-as-judge). We include a diverse set of CQA datasets to cover topic shifts, evolving intents, mixed-initiative dialogues, and multi-document grounding, testing ChatR1's performance from various aspects. Ablation studies confirm the effectiveness of the intent-aware reward. Our analyses further reveal diverse reasoning trajectories and effective use of the search tool. ChatR1 also generalizes robustly across domains, demonstrating that RL-based reasoning enables more flexible and context-aware behavior than static CQA pipelines.
title ChatR1: Reinforcement Learning for Conversational Reasoning and Retrieval Augmented Question Answering
topic Computation and Language
Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.13312