Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit strong problem-solving abilities, positioning them as promising agents for Socratic teaching to guide students through step-by-step heuristic questioning. However, existing approaches typically adopt a one-problem-one-solution paradigm, restricting the teaching guidance to a single linear reasoning path. This design limits instructional flexibility, weakens error recovery, and restricts students' ability to engage in parallel thinking to explore multiple valid solutions. To overcome these, we propose ToST, a Tree-of-Thought Socratic Teaching framework that explicitly supports multi-path guidance under a one-problem-multiple-solutions paradigm. ToST employs Parallel Sowing, a parallel-thinking-oriented questioning strategy to encourage students to approach problems from diverse perspectives, and a Multi-Path Adaptive Guidance mechanism to provide more robust and non-linear instructions across alternative solution trajectories. Concurrently, to fill the void in systematically evaluating such non-linear instructional capabilities, we advance the task of multi-path Socratic guidance by establishing MPSG-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark that includes a dataset of 31K multi-path teaching dialogues and a five-dimensional evaluation framework grounded in the SOLO (Structure of Observed Learning Outcomes) theory to assess parallel-thinking guidance. Experimental results demonstrate that ToST significantly enhances guidance success rates while empowering students to navigate and explore multiple solution paths more effectively under both automatic and human metrics.
Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at multi-step reasoning, yet current parallel reasoning approaches often fail to distinguish the contributions of individual reasoning paths. Many paths may be redundant, misleading, or even detrimental, but outcome-level rewards assign uniform reward, leading to ambiguous learning signals and unstable training. We propose Parallel Shapley, a reinforcement learning framework that attributes fine-grained, path-level contributions in multi-path reasoning. Treating each path as a player in a cooperative game, we leverage Shapley values to quantify marginal contributions, using a generative reward model to evaluate path utilities and Monte Carlo sampling for efficient approximation. Experiments on mathematical reasoning benchmarks show that Parallel Shapley outperforms existing baselines while providing more stable and interpretable training. Our framework effectively "fishes out the free riders," assigning reward proportionally and improving multi-path reasoning in LLMs.