Yuchen Zhang yuchen.zhang2003@gmail.com Ph.D. Student THU-C3I & Shanghai AI Lab

Biography

I am a first-year PhD student (2025 Fall) at Peking University, advised by Prof. Ning Ding and Prof. Bowen Zhou. I am also fortunate to work closely with Dr. Ganqu Cui and Prof. Yu Cheng. Before that, I graduated from University of Electronic Science and Technology of China with the Most Outstanding Students Award.

My research interests are building Large Reasoning Models in both digital and physical world with scalable and generalizable Reinforcement Learning methods.

Please feel free to contact me if you’re interested in relevant research or would like to discuss potential collaborations!

News

Publications [Full list: Google Scholar]

* indicates equal contribution unless otherwise specified.

• The Entropy Mechanism of Reinforcement Learning for Reasoning Language Models
  Ganqu Cui*, Yuchen Zhang*, Jiacheng Chen*, Lifan Yuan, Zhi Wang, Yuxin Zuo, Haozhan Li, Yuchen Fan, Huayu Chen, Weize Chen, Zhiyuan Liu, Hao Peng, Lei Bai, Wanli Ouyang, Yu Cheng, Bowen Zhou, Ning Ding
  arXiv 2025
  
• Process Reinforcement through Implicit Rewards
  Ganqu Cui*, Lifan Yuan*, Zefan Wang*, Hanbin Wang*, Yuchen Zhang*, Jiacheng Chen*, Wendi Li*, Bingxiang He*, Yuchen Fan*, Tianyu Yu*, Qixin Xu, Weize Chen, Jiarui Yuan, Huayu Chen, Kaiyan Zhang, Xingtai Lv, Shuo Wang, Yuan Yao, Xu Han, Hao Peng, Yu Cheng, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun, Bowen Zhou, Ning Ding
  (* Core Contributor) arXiv 2025
  
• TTRL: Test-time reinforcement learning
  Yuxin Zuo, Kaiyan Zhang, Li Sheng, Shang Qu, Ganqu Cui, Xuekai Zhu, Haozhan Li, Yuchen Zhang, Xinwei Long, Ermo Hua, Biqing Qi, Youbang Sun, Zhiyuan Ma, Lifan Yuan, Ning Ding, Bowen Zhou
  NeurIPS 2025
  
• Navigating Complexity: Toward Lossless Graph Condensation via Expanding Window Matching
  Yuchen Zhang, Tianle Zhang, Kai Wang, Ziyao Guo, Yuxuan Liang, Xavier Bresson, Wei Jin, Yang You
  ICML 2024
  
• GDeR: Safeguarding Efficiency, Balancing, and Robustness via Prototypical Graph Pruning
  Guibin Zhang, Haonan Dong, Yuchen Zhang, Zhixun Li, Dingshuo Chen, Kai Wang, Tianlong Chen, Yuxuan Liang, Dawei Cheng, Kun Wang
  NeurIPS 2024
  
• Rethinking Human Evaluation Protocol for Text-to-Video Models: Enhancing Reliability, Reproducibility, and Practicality
  Tianle Zhang, Langtian Ma, Yuchen Yan, Yuchen Zhang, Kai Wang, Yue Yang, Ziyao Guo, Wenqi Shao, Yang You, Yu Qiao, Ping Luo, Kaipeng Zhang
  NeurIPS 2024
  
• Enhancing Knowledge Transfer for Task Incremental Learning with Data-free Subnetwork
  Qiang Gao, Xiaojun Shan, Yuchen Zhang, Fan Zhou
  NeurIPS 2023
  

Honors & Awards

• The Most Outstanding Students Award of UESTC (Top 0.1%)
• UESTC-Huameng Scholarship (Top 3%)
• UESTC-LuZhouLaoJiao Scholarship (Top 3%)
• Outstanding Graduate of UESTC, Outstanding Graduate of Sichuan Province (Top 3%)
• First-class Scholarship, 2022, 2023, 2024
• National Second Prize | 16th Chinese Collegiate Computing Competition in 2023 (Top 2%)
• Provincial First Prize | 16th Chinese Collegiate Computing Competition in 2023
• Provincial Second Prize | 13th National E-commerce Innovation, Creativity and Entrepreneurship Challenge
• Provincial Second Prize | 8th C4-Network Technology Challenge
• Provincial Second Prize | 9th C4-Network Technology Challenge
• Provincial Second Prize | 17th China Collegiate Computing Competition

Invited Talks

• [07/2025] The Entropy Mechanism of Reinforcement Learning for Reasoning Language Models. @ Qingke AI
• [06/2024] Lossless Graph Condensation. @ Techbeat

Professional Activities

Conference Reviewer: NeurIPS 2024, 2025; ICLR 2025, 2026; ICML 2025; ACM MM 2024; WWW 2024; AISTATS 2025, 2026; ICASSP 2025; ICCV 2025; AAAI 2026

Organizer: The First Dataset Distillation Challenge @ ECCV 2024