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Mao Zheng

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Published work

8 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

Rubric-based On-policy Distillation

On-policy distillation (OPD) is a powerful paradigm for model alignment, yet its reliance on teacher logits restricts its application to white-box scenarios. We contend that structured semantic rubrics can serve as a scalable alternative to teacher logits, enabling OPD using only teacher-generated responses. To prove it, we introduce ROPD, a simple yet foundational framework for rubric-based OPD. Specifically, ROPD induces prompt-specific rubrics from teacher-student contrasts, and then utilizes these rubrics to score the student rollouts for on-policy optimization. Empirically, ROPD outperforms the advanced logit-based OPD methods across most scenarios, and achieving up to a 10x gain in sample efficiency. These results position rubric-based OPD as a flexible, black-box-compatible alternative to the prevailing logit-based OPD, offering a simple yet strong baseline for scalable distillation across proprietary and open-source LLMs. Code is available at https://github.com/Peregrine123/ROPD_official.

preprint2026arXiv

SimCT: Recovering Lost Supervision for Cross-Tokenizer On-Policy Distillation

On-policy distillation (OPD) is a standard tool for transferring teacher behavior to a smaller student, but it implicitly assumes that teacher and student predictions are comparable token by token, an assumption that fails whenever the two models tokenize the same text differently. Under heterogeneous tokenizers, exact shared-token matching silently discards a large fraction of the teacher signal at precisely the positions where vocabularies disagree. We propose \textbf{\underline{Sim}ple \underline{C}ross-\underline{T}okenizer OPD (SimCT)}, which restores this signal by enlarging the supervision space: alongside shared tokens, SimCT compares teacher and student over short multi-token continuations that both tokenizers can realize, leaving the OPD loss form itself unchanged. We show that these units are the finest jointly tokenizable supervision interface, and that coarser alternatives remove teacher-student distinctions that are useful for on-policy learning. Across three heterogeneous teacher-student pairs on mathematical reasoning and code-generation benchmarks, SimCT shows consistent gains over shared-vocabulary OPD and representative cross-tokenizer baselines, with ablations confirming that the improvements come from recovering supervision discarded by exact shared-token matching. Code is available at \href{https://github.com/sunjie279/SimCT-}{https://github.com/sunjie279/SimCT-}.

preprint2026arXiv

SOD: Step-wise On-policy Distillation for Small Language Model Agents

Tool-integrated reasoning (TIR) is difficult to scale to small language models due to instability in long-horizon tool interactions and limited model capacity. While reinforcement learning methods like group relative policy optimization provide only sparse outcome-level rewards. Recently, on-policy distillation (OPD) has gained popularity by supplying dense token-level supervision from a teacher on student-generated trajectories. However, our experiments indicate that applying OPD to TIR leads to a critical failure mode: erroneous tool calls tend to cascade across subsequent reasoning steps, progressively amplifying student-teacher divergence and rendering the teacher's token-level supervision increasingly unreliable. To address this, we propose SOD, a step-wise on-policy distillation framework for small language model agents, which adaptively reweights distillation strength at each step based on step-level divergence. Therefore, SOD can attenuate potentially misleading teacher signals in high-divergence regions while preserving dense guidance in well-aligned states. Experiments on challenging math, science, and code benchmarks show that SOD achieves up to 20.86% improvement over the second-best baseline. Notably, our 0.6B student achieves 26.13% on AIME 2025, demonstrating effective transfer of agentic reasoning to lightweight models. Our code is available at https://github.com/YoungZ365/SOD.

preprint2025arXiv

HY-MT1.5 Technical Report

In this report, we introduce our latest translation models, HY-MT1.5-1.8B and HY-MT1.5-7B, a new family of machine translation models developed through a holistic training framework tailored for high-performance translation. Our methodology orchestrates a multi-stage pipeline that integrates general and MT-oriented pre-training, supervised fine-tuning, on-policy distillation, and reinforcement learning. HY-MT1.5-1.8B, the 1.8B-parameter model demonstrates remarkable parameter efficiency, comprehensively outperforming significantly larger open-source baselines (e.g., Tower-Plus-72B, Qwen3-32B) and mainstream commercial APIs (e.g., Microsoft Translator, Doubao Translator) in standard Chinese-foreign and English-foreign tasks. It achieves approximately 90% of the performance of ultra-large proprietary models such as Gemini-3.0-Pro, while marginally trailing Gemini-3.0-Pro on WMT25 and Mandarin-minority language benchmarks, it maintains a substantial lead over other competing models. Furthermore, HY-MT1.5-7B establishes a new state-of-the-art for its size class, achieving 95% of Gemini-3.0-Pro's performance on Flores-200 and surpassing it on the challenging WMT25 and Mandarin-minority language test sets. Beyond standard translation, the HY-MT1.5 series supports advanced constraints, including terminology intervention, context-aware translation, and format preservation. Extensive empirical evaluations confirm that both models offer highly competitive, robust solutions for general and specialized translation tasks within their respective parameter scales.

preprint2022arXiv

Alignment-Uniformity aware Representation Learning for Zero-shot Video Classification

Most methods tackle zero-shot video classification by aligning visual-semantic representations within seen classes, which limits generalization to unseen classes. To enhance model generalizability, this paper presents an end-to-end framework that preserves alignment and uniformity properties for representations on both seen and unseen classes. Specifically, we formulate a supervised contrastive loss to simultaneously align visual-semantic features (i.e., alignment) and encourage the learned features to distribute uniformly (i.e., uniformity). Unlike existing methods that only consider the alignment, we propose uniformity to preserve maximal-info of existing features, which improves the probability that unobserved features fall around observed data. Further, we synthesize features of unseen classes by proposing a class generator that interpolates and extrapolates the features of seen classes. Besides, we introduce two metrics, closeness and dispersion, to quantify the two properties and serve as new measurements of model generalizability. Experiments show that our method significantly outperforms SoTA by relative improvements of 28.1% on UCF101 and 27.0% on HMDB51. Code is available.

preprint2016arXiv

Modeling The Adaption Rule in Context-aware Systems

Context awareness is increasingly gaining applicability in interactive ubiquitous mobile computing systems. Each context-aware application has its own set of behaviors to react to context modifications. This paper is concerned with the context modeling and the development methodology for context-aware systems. We proposed a rule-based approach and use the adaption tree to model the adaption rule of context-aware systems. We illustrate this idea in an arithmetic game application.

preprint2013arXiv

Uniform Oxygen Doping Leads to Superconductivity in FeTe Films

FeTe is known to become a superconductor when doped with oxygen. Using layer by layer growth of single crystal films by molecular beam epitaxy (MBE), we have studied how oxygen incorporates. If oxygen is supplied during growth of a layer, it substitutes for tellurium inhomogeneously in oxygen domains that are not associated with superconductivity. When oxygen is supplied after growth, it diffuses homogeneously into the crystalline film and incorporates interstitially. Only the interstitial oxygen causes superconductivity to emerge. This suggests that the superconductivity observed in this material is spatially uniform and not filamentary.

preprint2011arXiv

Growth and Properties of Heavy Fermion CeCu2Ge2 and CeFe2Ge2 thin films

Epitaxial films of heavy fermion CeCu2Ge2 and CeFe2Ge2 are grown on DyScO3 and MgO substrates using molecular beam epitaxy. The growth begins via island nucleation leading to a granular morphology. The grains grow flat with c-axis orientation after nucleating, as indicated by in-situ reflection high energy electron diffraction (RHEED) and ex-situ analysis including atomic force microscopy (AFM) and x-ray diffraction (XRD). These single phase films show similar temperature dependent transport to single crystals of the materials indicating that similar collective order occurs in the films as in single crystals.