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).

During my PhD, my research is supported by Apple PhD Fellowship and Yunni and Maxine Pao Memorial Fellowship. For further information, please see my CV (last update: 2025.10.02).

Research Interests: My research focuses on LLM post-training, including reinforcement learning, reasoning, agentic behavior, and model creativity.

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]

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