Yutong Chen
Publications
Penelope: Localized Latent Recurrence for Efficient Structured Reasoning
Complex structured reasoning tasks often require additional computation, yet current language models obtain it mainly by increasing parameter scale or by serializing intermediate steps as chain-of-thought (CoT) tokens. The former raises training and deployment costs, while the latter ties reasoning computation to autoregressive output length. We introduce Penelope, an efficient latent-reasoning framework for pretrained decoder-only Transformers that localizes recurrent computation to a selected decoder interval. The lower decoder prefix is evaluated once to construct a problem-conditioned boundary memory, which is then iteratively refined through time-modulated GRU dynamics and recurrent readout states before answer generation. A progressive CoT-to-latent curriculum transfers visible reasoning into this internal recurrent path, allowing additional computation to be allocated in latent space without repeatedly executing the complete decoder or generating a long intermediate trace. Experiments on open-source structured-reasoning benchmarks show that, at validation-selected latent budgets, Penelope attains competitive accuracy relative to established latent-reasoning models while reducing measured inference latency. These results show that latent refinement can be localized to a narrow decoder interval, reducing repeated full-decoder execution without generating a long visible reasoning trace and providing a practical accuracy-efficiency tradeoff for decoder-only Transformer models.
CoScale-RL: Efficient Post-Training by Co-Scaling Data and Computation
Training Large Reasoning Model (LRM) is usually unstable and unpredictable, especially on hard problems or weak foundation models. We found that the current post-training scaling strategy can still improve on these cases. We propose CoScale-RL, a novel scaling strategy with better data and computational efficiency. We first scale up solutions to make problems solvable. The core idea is to collect multiple solutions for each problem, rather than simply enlarging the dataset. Then, we scale up rollout computation to stabilize Reinforcement Learning. We further leverage a model merge technique called Re-distillation to sustain or even improve computational efficiency when scaling up. Our method significantly improves data and computational efficiency, with an average 3.76$\times$ accuracy improvement on four benchmarks. CoScale-RL is able to improve an LRM's ability boundary without an extensive SFT dataset. Our method provides a new scaling direction to further improve LRM's reasoning ability.
ENTRA: Entropy-Based Redundancy Avoidance in Large Language Model Reasoning
Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) often suffer from overthinking, generating unnecessarily long reasoning chains even for simple tasks. This leads to substantial computational overhead with limited performance gain, primarily due to redundant verification and repetitive generation. While prior work typically constrains output length or optimizes correctness, such coarse supervision fails to guide models toward concise yet accurate inference. In this paper, we propose ENTRA, an entropy-based training framework that suppresses redundant reasoning while preserving performance. ENTRA first estimates the token-level importance using a lightweight Bidirectional Importance Estimation (BIE) method, which accounts for both prediction confidence and forward influence. It then computes a redundancy reward based on the entropy of low-importance tokens, normalized by its theoretical upper bound, and optimizes this reward via reinforcement learning. Experiments on mathematical reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that ENTRA reduces output length by 37% to 53% with no loss-and in some cases, gains-in accuracy. Our approach offers a principled and efficient solution to reduce overthinking in LRMs, and provides a generalizable path toward redundancy-aware reasoning optimization.