Guangyi Chen
2026
Advancing Reasoning in Diffusion Language Models with Denoising Process Rewards
Shaoan Xie | Lingjing Kong | Xiangchen Song | Xinshuai Dong | Guangyi Chen | Eric P. Xing | Kun Zhang
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Shaoan Xie | Lingjing Kong | Xiangchen Song | Xinshuai Dong | Guangyi Chen | Eric P. Xing | Kun Zhang
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Diffusion-based large language models offer a non-autoregressive alternative for text generation, but enabling them to perform complex reasoning remains challenging. Reinforcement learning has recently emerged as an effective post-training strategy for improving their performance; however, existing methods rely primarily on outcome-based rewards, which provide no direct supervision over the denoising process and often result in poorly structured reasoning that is difficult to interpret and inconsistently supports the final prediction. To address this limitation, we introduce denoising process reward, a process-level reinforcement signal defined over the denoising trajectory of diffusion language models. This reward is obtained by estimating the contribution of intermediate denoising intervals to the final task outcome, encouraging the model to favor reasoning trajectories that consistently guide generation toward correct predictions. We further propose an efficient stochastic estimator that reuses standard training rollouts, enabling practical process-level supervision at scale. Experiments on challenging reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that our approach yields consistent improvements in reasoning stability, interpretability, and overall task performance.
2024
Encourage or Inhibit Monosemanticity? Revisit Monosemanticity from a Feature Decorrelation Perspective
Hanqi Yan | Yanzheng Xiang | Guangyi Chen | Yifei Wang | Lin Gui | Yulan He
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Hanqi Yan | Yanzheng Xiang | Guangyi Chen | Yifei Wang | Lin Gui | Yulan He
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
To better interpret the intrinsic mechanism of large language models (LLMs), recent studies focus on monosemanticity on its basic units. A monosemantic neuron is dedicated to a single and specific concept, which forms a one-to-one correlation between neurons and concepts. Despite extensive research in monosemanticity probing, it remains unclear whether monosemanticity is beneficial or harmful to model capacity. To explore this question, we revisit monosemanticity from the feature decorrelation perspective and advocate for its encouragement. We experimentally observe that the current conclusion by (CITATION), which suggests that decreasing monosemanticity enhances model performance, does not hold when the model changes. Instead, we demonstrate that monosemanticity consistently exhibits a positive correlation with model capacity, in the preference alignment process. Consequently, we apply feature correlation as a proxy for monosemanticity and incorporate a feature decorrelation regularizer into the dynamic preference optimization process. The experiments show that our method not only enhances representation diversity and activation sparsity but also improves preference alignment performance.