LongForge: Measuring and Improving Long-Context Instruction Data via Evidence-Assertion Reasoning Graphs

Abstract

Existing quality control for long-context instruction-tuning data is a one-shot judgment inside the generation pipeline that leaves only a scalar, revealing neither which document parts an answer uses nor how many reasoning steps it writes down; the data can thus be neither audited nor controlled. We formalize data quality as a property of the alignment structure among document, question, and answer, and build LongForge, which pairs an analyzer that measures long-context data with a synthesizer that generates it. The analyzer reverse-reconstructs each sample into an evidence-assertion reasoning graph and programmatically computes four dimensions on it: breadth, depth, correctness, and completeness. Every reading traces back to specific evidence spans and reasoning steps, making data auditable. Measuring seven mainstream datasets reveals two previously unquantified defects: breadth barely grows with document length, and depth is generally low, the two being nearly orthogonal. The synthesizer then embeds the analyzer into generation, gating on correctness and completeness and deferring breadth and depth to a training-time mixture over measured values, which makes the training distribution controllable. On two backbones, its two mixtures, LongForge-1 and LongForge-N, outperform the strongest baseline by 2.2-4.7 points on average over six long-context benchmarks, and in a controlled comparison that holds the gate and the candidate pool fixed, raising breadth and depth alone is worth a further 1.16 points, making the structural distribution of training data a lever on downstream quality rather than only a description of it.