Long-context reasoning requires models to locate, revise, and synthesize evidence distributed across lengthy inputs. Existing long-context RL methods usually reward final answers or static evidence extraction, offering little feedback on how intermediate actions change the model's evidence state. We propose Maven, a reinforcement learning framework with an editable evidence memory. Maven defines an answer-conditioned evidence-state value and rewards action-level state transitions: add actions are credited by marginal gain and hindsight contribution, link actions by evidence synergy, and drop actions by improved answer support after removing misleading evidence. These rewards are assigned to the corresponding action spans in GRPO. Across Llama and Qwen models on LongBench v2, LongReason, and RULER, Maven outperforms outcome-only RL and evidence-identification baselines, producing more sufficient evidence sets and lower distractor retention. Our results show that long-context RL benefits from optimizing stateful evidence navigation rather than one-shot evidence extraction.
Modern LLMs are increasingly deployed in long-context applications such as retrieval-augmented generation, repository-level coding, and agentic workflows whose accumulated reasoning and tool traces routinely push the input an order of magnitude past the pretraining window, making…
The quadratic computational cost of traditional attention mechanisms poses a major bottleneck to the scalability and practical deployment of large language models (LLMs), particularly in long-context scenarios. To improve efficiency, existing approaches often enforce rigid struct…
As large language models (LLMs) process increasingly longer prompts, computation and KV-cache memory costs have emerged as major bottlenecks in inference systems. Existing input-level prompt compression methods address this, but rank each sentence by a scalar relevance score, tre…
Context engineering decides what information a model carries forward, and current designs meter it in tokens: compressing the past into a bounded recurrent state, keeping a key-value entry for every token, or imposing a fixed budget through a window or eviction rule. All three ma…
When should an AI system's answer be trusted? Formal proof assistants offer certainty but cannot reach most of the problem distribution; scalar LLM judges offer coverage but produce opaque scores that cannot be audited after the fact and are subject to the same coherence issues a…
High-throughput long-context generation is one of the central challenges for large language models. Generation is typically memory-bandwidth-bound rather than compute-bound: each decoding step must stream the accumulated key/value (KV) cache from memory, so bandwidth demand grows…