I am a Research Scientist at OpenAI. I received my PhD in Computer Science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where I was fortunate to be advised by Prof. Jiawei Han. Prior to my doctoral studies, I earned my bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Tsinghua University. During the past, I spent time at Apple AIML, Google Research, Amazon Search, and Microsoft Research (both Redmond and Beijing). For further information, please see my CV (last update: 2025.10.02).

I invent Search-R1, one of the first open-source frameworks to enable LLMs’ reasoning and agentic capability through reinforcement learning (4.5k+ Github stars).

Selected Publications [Full List]

• An Empirical Study on Reinforcement Learning for Reasoning-Search Interleaved LLM Agents
  Bowen Jin, Jinsung Yoon, Priyanka Kargupta, Sercan O. Arik, Jiawei Han.
  preprint 2025.
  [PDF] [Code] [Resource]

• Search-R1: Training LLMs to Reason and Leverage Search Engines with Reinforcement Learning
  Bowen Jin, Hansi Zeng, Zhenrui Yue, Jinsung Yoon, Sercan O. Arik, Dong Wang, Hamed Zamani, Jiawei Han.
  COLM 2025.
  [PDF] [Code] [Resource] [Media] [English Record] [Chinese Record] 4k+ Github stars

• LLM Alignment as Retriever Optimization: An Information Retrieval Perspective
  Bowen Jin, Jinsung Yoon, Zhen Qin, Ziqi Wang, Wei Xiong, Yu Meng, Jiawei Han, Sercan O. Arik.
  ICML 2025.
  [PDF] [Code]

• Long-Context LLMs Meet RAG: Overcoming Challenges for Long Inputs in RAG
  Bowen Jin, Jinsung Yoon, Jiawei Han, Sercan O. Arik.
  ICLR 2025.
  [PDF] [Resource]

• Graph Chain-of-Thought: Augmenting Large Language Models by Reasoning on Graphs
  Bowen Jin, Chulin Xie, Jiawei Zhang, Kashob Kumar Roy, Yu Zhang, Suhang Wang, Yu Meng, Jiawei Han.
  ACL 2024 (findings).
  [PDF] [Code] [Data]

• Language Models as Semantic Indexers
  Bowen Jin, Hansi Zeng, Guoyin Wang, Xiusi Chen, Tianxin Wei, Ruirui Li, et al.
  ICML 2024.
  [PDF] [Code]

• Patton: Language Model Pretraining on Text-rich Networks
  Bowen Jin, Wentao Zhang, Yu Zhang, Yu Meng, Xinyang Zhang, Qi Zhu, Jiawei Han.
  ACL 2023 (Oral).
  [PDF] [Code]

• Edgeformers: Graph-Empowered Transformers for Representation Learning on Textual-Edge Networks
  Bowen Jin, Yu Zhang, Yu Meng, Jiawei Han.
  ICLR 2023 (Poster).
  [PDF] [Code]

Education

• University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Ph.D. in Computer Science (2021 - 2026).
• Tsinghua University, B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Statistics (2017 - 2021).

Miscellaneous

I started to play a traditional Chinese instrument, Sheng at the age of eight. Here is a concert record of mine. Hope you enjoy it!:)

I’m a “universal” ball fan ⚽️🏀🎾 and enjoy working out 🏋️. If you cannot find me in office, catch me at the gym. 😃

Contact

Email: bowen_jin[AT]outlook.com