Yixiao Chen
Publications
Human Cognition in Machines: A Unified Perspective of World Models
This comprehensive report distinguishes prior works by the cognitive functions they innovate. Many works claim an almost "human-like" cognitive capability in their world models. To evaluate these claims requires a proper grounding in first principles in Cognitive Architecture Theory (CAT). We present a conceptual unified framework for world models that fully incorporates all the cognitive functions associated with CAT (i.e. memory, perception, language, reasoning, imagining, motivation, and meta-cognition) and identify gaps in the research as a guide for future states of the art. In particular, we find that motivation (especially intrinsic motivation) and meta-cognition remain drastically under-researched, and we propose concrete directions informed by active inference and global workspace theory to address them. We further introduce Epistemic World Models, a new category encompassing agent frameworks for scientific discovery that operate over structured knowledge. Our taxonomy, applied across video, embodied, and epistemic world models, suggests research directions where prior taxonomies have not.
DeepSeek-V3.2: Pushing the Frontier of Open Large Language Models
We introduce DeepSeek-V3.2, a model that harmonizes high computational efficiency with superior reasoning and agent performance. The key technical breakthroughs of DeepSeek-V3.2 are as follows: (1) DeepSeek Sparse Attention (DSA): We introduce DSA, an efficient attention mechanism that substantially reduces computational complexity while preserving model performance in long-context scenarios. (2) Scalable Reinforcement Learning Framework: By implementing a robust reinforcement learning protocol and scaling post-training compute, DeepSeek-V3.2 performs comparably to GPT-5. Notably, our high-compute variant, DeepSeek-V3.2-Speciale, surpasses GPT-5 and exhibits reasoning proficiency on par with Gemini-3.0-Pro, achieving gold-medal performance in both the 2025 International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) and the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI). (3) Large-Scale Agentic Task Synthesis Pipeline: To integrate reasoning into tool-use scenarios, we developed a novel synthesis pipeline that systematically generates training data at scale. This methodology facilitates scalable agentic post-training, yielding substantial improvements in generalization and instruction-following robustness within complex, interactive environments.