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Main Authors: Chen, Xin, Jiang, Feng, Zhang, Yiqian, Chen, Hardy, Yan, Shuo, Xie, Wenya, Yang, Min, Huang, Shujian
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.22139
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author Chen, Xin
Jiang, Feng
Zhang, Yiqian
Chen, Hardy
Yan, Shuo
Xie, Wenya
Yang, Min
Huang, Shujian
author_facet Chen, Xin
Jiang, Feng
Zhang, Yiqian
Chen, Hardy
Yan, Shuo
Xie, Wenya
Yang, Min
Huang, Shujian
contents Reasoning-oriented Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting, yet they remain fundamentally limited by a \emph{blind self-thinking} paradigm: performing extensive internal reasoning even when critical information is missing or ambiguous. We propose Proactive Interactive Reasoning (PIR), a new reasoning paradigm that transforms LLMs from passive solvers into proactive inquirers that interleave reasoning with clarification. Unlike existing search- or tool-based frameworks that primarily address knowledge uncertainty by querying external environments, PIR targets premise- and intent-level uncertainty through direct interaction with the user. PIR is implemented via two core components: (1) an uncertainty-aware supervised fine-tuning procedure that equips models with interactive reasoning capability, and (2) a user-simulator-based policy optimization framework driven by a composite reward that aligns model behavior with user intent. Extensive experiments on mathematical reasoning, code generation, and document editing demonstrate that PIR consistently outperforms strong baselines, achieving up to 32.70\% higher accuracy, 22.90\% higher pass rate, and 41.36 BLEU improvement, while reducing nearly half of the reasoning computation and unnecessary interaction turns. Further reliability evaluations on factual knowledge, question answering, and missing-premise scenarios confirm the strong generalization and robustness of PIR. Model and code are publicly available at: \href{https://github.com/SUAT-AIRI/Proactive-Interactive-R1}
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_22139
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Reasoning While Asking: Transforming Reasoning Large Language Models from Passive Solvers to Proactive Inquirers
Chen, Xin
Jiang, Feng
Zhang, Yiqian
Chen, Hardy
Yan, Shuo
Xie, Wenya
Yang, Min
Huang, Shujian
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Reasoning-oriented Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting, yet they remain fundamentally limited by a \emph{blind self-thinking} paradigm: performing extensive internal reasoning even when critical information is missing or ambiguous. We propose Proactive Interactive Reasoning (PIR), a new reasoning paradigm that transforms LLMs from passive solvers into proactive inquirers that interleave reasoning with clarification. Unlike existing search- or tool-based frameworks that primarily address knowledge uncertainty by querying external environments, PIR targets premise- and intent-level uncertainty through direct interaction with the user. PIR is implemented via two core components: (1) an uncertainty-aware supervised fine-tuning procedure that equips models with interactive reasoning capability, and (2) a user-simulator-based policy optimization framework driven by a composite reward that aligns model behavior with user intent. Extensive experiments on mathematical reasoning, code generation, and document editing demonstrate that PIR consistently outperforms strong baselines, achieving up to 32.70\% higher accuracy, 22.90\% higher pass rate, and 41.36 BLEU improvement, while reducing nearly half of the reasoning computation and unnecessary interaction turns. Further reliability evaluations on factual knowledge, question answering, and missing-premise scenarios confirm the strong generalization and robustness of PIR. Model and code are publicly available at: \href{https://github.com/SUAT-AIRI/Proactive-Interactive-R1}
title Reasoning While Asking: Transforming Reasoning Large Language Models from Passive Solvers to Proactive Inquirers
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.22139