ARise: Towards Knowledge-Augmented Reasoning via Risk-Adaptive Search

Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities and are receiving increasing attention to enhance their reasoning through scaling test--time compute. However, their application in open--ended, knowledge--intensive, complex reasoning scenarios is still limited. Reasoning--oriented methods struggle to generalize to open--ended scenarios due to implicit assumptions of complete world knowledge. Meanwhile, knowledge--augmented reasoning (KAR) methods fail to address two core challenges: 1) error propagation, where errors in early steps cascade through the chain, and 2) verification bottleneck, where the explore--exploit tradeoff arises in multi--branch decision processes. To overcome these limitations, we introduce ARise, a novel framework that integrates risk assessment of intermediate reasoning states with dynamic retrieval--augmented generation (RAG) within a Monte Carlo tree search paradigm. This approach enables effective construction and optimization of reasoning plans across multiple maintained hypothesis branches. Experimental results show that ARise significantly outperforms the state--of--the--art KAR methods by up to 23.10%, and the latest RAG-equipped large reasoning models by up to 25.37%. Our project page is at https://opencausalab.github.io/ARise.