William Chen

wc187 at duke dot edu

Helloo! Thanks for visiting. I'm a senior at Duke University studying math and computer science, and I work on generative models and reasoning.

I am fortunate to be advised by Alexi Gladstone and Xiang Cheng. In addition, I am grateful to have worked with Zeyu Li and Hun Kang.

News

Nothing much right now.

Research

I'm broadly interested in generative modeling, particularly how models learn and represent the underlying structure of data. Recently, I've been exploring how these models use their learned representations to do compositional reasoning and generate new samples.

Publications

2026

Energy-Based Reasoners: Your Recurrent Reasoner Should Be an Energy-Based Model

W. Chen, A. Gladstone, Z. Li, H. Ji, and Y. Du.

PreprintarXiv Project page Code

Co-Evolving Paths and Flows via Path-Flow Alignment

Z. Li*, W. Chen*, and X. Cheng.

NeurIPS 2026arXiv

How Do DiTs Denoise? An Aggregator-Predictor View of Attention and MLPs

G. Kang, W. Chen, and X. Cheng.

PreprintarXiv

ELF-REG: Scaling Continuous Diffusion Language Models to Reasoning Tasks

Z. Li, W. Chen, B. Qian, J. Liu, and X. Cheng.

PreprintarXiv

* equal contribution