Ru Peng

CL
h-index21
13papers
2,693citations
Novelty53%
AI Score59

13 Papers

CLJul 15, 2024
Qwen2 Technical Report

An Yang, Baosong Yang, Binyuan Hui et al.

This report introduces the Qwen2 series, the latest addition to our large language models and large multimodal models. We release a comprehensive suite of foundational and instruction-tuned language models, encompassing a parameter range from 0.5 to 72 billion, featuring dense models and a Mixture-of-Experts model. Qwen2 surpasses most prior open-weight models, including its predecessor Qwen1.5, and exhibits competitive performance relative to proprietary models across diverse benchmarks on language understanding, generation, multilingual proficiency, coding, mathematics, and reasoning. The flagship model, Qwen2-72B, showcases remarkable performance: 84.2 on MMLU, 37.9 on GPQA, 64.6 on HumanEval, 89.5 on GSM8K, and 82.4 on BBH as a base language model. The instruction-tuned variant, Qwen2-72B-Instruct, attains 9.1 on MT-Bench, 48.1 on Arena-Hard, and 35.7 on LiveCodeBench. Moreover, Qwen2 demonstrates robust multilingual capabilities, proficient in approximately 30 languages, spanning English, Chinese, Spanish, French, German, Arabic, Russian, Korean, Japanese, Thai, Vietnamese, and more, underscoring its versatility and global reach. To foster community innovation and accessibility, we have made the Qwen2 model weights openly available on Hugging Face and ModelScope, and the supplementary materials including example code on GitHub. These platforms also include resources for quantization, fine-tuning, and deployment, facilitating a wide range of applications and research endeavors.

CLOct 10, 2022Code
Distill the Image to Nowhere: Inversion Knowledge Distillation for Multimodal Machine Translation

Ru Peng, Yawen Zeng, Junbo Zhao

Past works on multimodal machine translation (MMT) elevate bilingual setup by incorporating additional aligned vision information. However, an image-must requirement of the multimodal dataset largely hinders MMT's development -- namely that it demands an aligned form of [image, source text, target text]. This limitation is generally troublesome during the inference phase especially when the aligned image is not provided as in the normal NMT setup. Thus, in this work, we introduce IKD-MMT, a novel MMT framework to support the image-free inference phase via an inversion knowledge distillation scheme. In particular, a multimodal feature generator is executed with a knowledge distillation module, which directly generates the multimodal feature from (only) source texts as the input. While there have been a few prior works entertaining the possibility to support image-free inference for machine translation, their performances have yet to rival the image-must translation. In our experiments, we identify our method as the first image-free approach to comprehensively rival or even surpass (almost) all image-must frameworks, and achieved the state-of-the-art result on the often-used Multi30k benchmark. Our code and data are available at: https://github.com/pengr/IKD-mmt/tree/master..

CLJul 4, 2024Code
DotaMath: Decomposition of Thought with Code Assistance and Self-correction for Mathematical Reasoning

Chengpeng Li, Guanting Dong, Mingfeng Xue et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have made impressive progress in handling simple math problems, yet they still struggle with more challenging and complex mathematical tasks. In this paper, we introduce a series of LLMs that employs the Decomposition of thought with code assistance and self-correction for mathematical reasoning, dubbed as DotaMath. DotaMath models tackle complex mathematical tasks by decomposing them into simpler logical subtasks, leveraging code to solve these subtasks, obtaining fine-grained feedback from the code interpreter, and engaging in self-reflection and correction. By annotating diverse interactive tool-use trajectories and employing query evolution on GSM8K and MATH datasets, we generate an instruction fine-tuning dataset called DotaMathQA with 574K query-response pairs. We train a series of base LLMs using imitation learning on DotaMathQA, resulting in DotaMath models that achieve remarkable performance compared to open-source LLMs across various in-domain and out-of-domain benchmarks. Notably, DotaMath-deepseek-7B showcases an outstanding performance of 64.8% on the competitive MATH dataset and 86.7% on GSM8K. Besides, DotaMath-deepseek-7B maintains strong competitiveness on a series of in-domain and out-of-domain benchmarks (Avg. 80.1%). Looking forward, we anticipate that the DotaMath paradigm will open new pathways for addressing intricate mathematical problems. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/ChengpengLi1003/DotaMath.

92.9AIMay 29
From "Weak" Signals to Strong Models: Preference Delta Aggregation with LoRA Merging

Qi Sun, Siyue Zhang, Yulin Chen et al.

Training strong large language models (LLMs) requires high-quality supervision, which is often scarce. Recent work shows that paired preference data from weak-weaker model pairs (e.g., Qwen3 4B over 1.7B), despite the limited quality of individual responses, can provide an effective supervision signal through relative quality deltas, which we term a "weak" signal. This motivates a key research question: can multiple "weak" signals be constructively aggregated for improving strong models (e.g., Qwen3 8B)? To this end, we propose Preference Delta Aggregation (PDA), the first framework that derives a preference delta from each weak-weaker model pair, instantiates it as a LoRA adapter learned through preference optimization, and aggregates the resulting deltas via LoRA merging. To further mitigate directional interference during LoRA merging, we introduce Geometric Alignment Merging (GAM), a geometry-aware merging method that aligns adapter subspaces before aggregation, enabling more robust composition of diverse deltas. Evaluations on knowledge reasoning and agentic search benchmarks show that aggregating multiple "weak" signals pushes performance beyond any single signal, with further gains as additional signals are incorporated. Correspondingly, PDA with GAM improves the strong model by 6.8 and 7.3 points on average for knowledge reasoning and agentic search, respectively. It outperforms all single-delta and multi-delta baselines, exceeding the best single-delta baseline by 2.1 and 4.3 points. Further analysis attributes these gains to the effective composition of complementary capabilities encoded across distinct preference deltas.

CLAug 20, 2024Code
Predicting Rewards Alongside Tokens: Non-disruptive Parameter Insertion for Efficient Inference Intervention in Large Language Model

Chenhan Yuan, Fei Huang, Ru Peng et al.

Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) exhibit limitations such as generating unsafe responses, unreliable reasoning, etc. Existing inference intervention approaches attempt to mitigate these issues by finetuning additional models to produce calibration signals (such as rewards) that guide the LLM's decoding process. However, this solution introduces substantial time and space overhead due to the separate models required. This work proposes Non-disruptive parameters insertion (Otter), inserting extra parameters into the transformer architecture to predict calibration signals along with the original LLM output. Otter offers state-of-the-art performance on multiple demanding tasks while saving up to 86.5\% extra space and 98.5\% extra time. Furthermore, Otter seamlessly integrates with existing inference engines, requiring only a one-line code change, and the original model response remains accessible after the parameter insertion. Our code is publicly available at \url{https://github.com/chenhan97/Otter}

CLApr 21, 2023Code
Better Sign Language Translation with Monolingual Data

Ru Peng, Yawen Zeng, Junbo Zhao

Sign language translation (SLT) systems, which are often decomposed into video-to-gloss (V2G) recognition and gloss-to-text (G2T) translation through the pivot gloss, heavily relies on the availability of large-scale parallel G2T pairs. However, the manual annotation of pivot gloss, which is a sequence of transcribed written-language words in the order in which they are signed, further exacerbates the scarcity of data for SLT. To address this issue, this paper proposes a simple and efficient rule transformation method to transcribe the large-scale target monolingual data into its pseudo glosses automatically for enhancing the SLT translation. Empirical results show that the proposed approach can significantly improve the performance of SLT, especially achieving state-of-the-art results on two SLT benchmark datasets PHEONIX-WEATHER 2014T and ASLG-PC12. Our code has been released at: https://github.com/pengr/Mono\_SLT.

CVAug 22, 2023
CAME: Contrastive Automated Model Evaluation

Ru Peng, Qiuyang Duan, Haobo Wang et al.

The Automated Model Evaluation (AutoEval) framework entertains the possibility of evaluating a trained machine learning model without resorting to a labeled testing set. Despite the promise and some decent results, the existing AutoEval methods heavily rely on computing distribution shifts between the unlabelled testing set and the training set. We believe this reliance on the training set becomes another obstacle in shipping this technology to real-world ML development. In this work, we propose Contrastive Automatic Model Evaluation (CAME), a novel AutoEval framework that is rid of involving training set in the loop. The core idea of CAME bases on a theoretical analysis which bonds the model performance with a contrastive loss. Further, with extensive empirical validation, we manage to set up a predictable relationship between the two, simply by deducing on the unlabeled/unseen testing set. The resulting framework CAME establishes a new SOTA results for AutoEval by surpassing prior work significantly.

LGJan 23, 2024Code
Energy-based Automated Model Evaluation

Ru Peng, Heming Zou, Haobo Wang et al.

The conventional evaluation protocols on machine learning models rely heavily on a labeled, i.i.d-assumed testing dataset, which is not often present in real world applications. The Automated Model Evaluation (AutoEval) shows an alternative to this traditional workflow, by forming a proximal prediction pipeline of the testing performance without the presence of ground-truth labels. Despite its recent successes, the AutoEval frameworks still suffer from an overconfidence issue, substantial storage and computational cost. In that regard, we propose a novel measure -- Meta-Distribution Energy (MDE) -- that allows the AutoEval framework to be both more efficient and effective. The core of the MDE is to establish a meta-distribution statistic, on the information (energy) associated with individual samples, then offer a smoother representation enabled by energy-based learning. We further provide our theoretical insights by connecting the MDE with the classification loss. We provide extensive experiments across modalities, datasets and different architectural backbones to validate MDE's validity, together with its superiority compared with prior approaches. We also prove MDE's versatility by showing its seamless integration with large-scale models, and easy adaption to learning scenarios with noisy- or imbalanced- labels. Code and data are available: https://github.com/pengr/Energy_AutoEval

AIAug 18, 2025Code
Reinforcement Learning with Rubric Anchors

Zenan Huang, Yihong Zhuang, Guoshan Lu et al.

Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for enhancing Large Language Models (LLMs), exemplified by the success of OpenAI's o-series. In RLVR, rewards are derived from verifiable signals-such as passing unit tests in code generation or matching correct answers in mathematical reasoning. While effective, this requirement largely confines RLVR to domains with automatically checkable outcomes. To overcome this, we extend the RLVR paradigm to open-ended tasks by integrating rubric-based rewards, where carefully designed rubrics serve as structured, model-interpretable criteria for automatic scoring of subjective outputs. We construct, to our knowledge, the largest rubric reward system to date, with over 10,000 rubrics from humans, LLMs, or a hybrid human-LLM collaboration. Implementing rubric-based RL is challenging; we tackle these issues with a clear framework and present an open-sourced Qwen-30B-A3B model with notable gains: 1) With only 5K+ samples, our system improves by +5.2% on open-ended benchmarks (especially humanities), outperforming a 671B DeepSeek-V3 model by +2.4%, while preserving general and reasoning abilities. 2) Our method provides fine-grained stylistic control, using rubrics as anchors to mitigate the "AI-like" tone and produce more human-like, expressive responses. We share key lessons in rubric construction, data selection, and training, and discuss limitations and future releases.

46.8CLApr 1
Optimsyn: Influence-Guided Rubrics Optimization for Synthetic Data Generation

Zhiting Fan, Ruizhe Chen, Tianxiang Hu et al.

Large language models (LLMs) achieve strong downstream performance largely due to abundant supervised fine-tuning (SFT) data. However, high-quality SFT data in knowledge-intensive domains such as humanities, social sciences, medicine, law, and finance is scarce because expert curation is expensive, privacy constraints are strict, and label consistency is hard to ensure. Recent work uses synthetic data, typically by prompting a generator over domain documents and filtering outputs with handcrafted rubrics. Yet rubric design is expert-dependent, transfers poorly across domains, and is often optimized through a brittle heuristic loop of writing rubrics, synthesizing data, training, inspecting results, and manually guessing revisions. This process lacks reliable quantitative feedback about how a rubric affects downstream performance. We propose evaluating synthetic data by its training utility on the target model and using this signal to guide data generation. Inspired by influence estimation, we adopt an optimizer-aware estimator that uses gradient information to quantify each synthetic sample's contribution to a target model's objective on specific tasks. Our analysis shows that even when synthetic and real samples are close in embedding space, their influence on learning can differ substantially. Based on this insight, we propose an optimization-based framework that adapts rubrics using target-model feedback. We provide lightweight guiding text and use a rubric-specialized model to generate task-conditioned rubrics. Influence score is used as the reward to optimize the rubric generator with reinforcement learning. Experiments across domains, target models, and data generators show consistent improvements and strong generalization without task-specific tuning.

CLFeb 26, 2025
DataMan: Data Manager for Pre-training Large Language Models

Ru Peng, Kexin Yang, Yawen Zeng et al.

The performance emergence of large language models (LLMs) driven by data scaling laws makes the selection of pre-training data increasingly important. However, existing methods rely on limited heuristics and human intuition, lacking comprehensive and clear guidelines. To address this, we are inspired by ``reverse thinking'' -- prompting LLMs to self-identify which criteria benefit its performance. As its pre-training capabilities are related to perplexity (PPL), we derive 14 quality criteria from the causes of text perplexity anomalies and introduce 15 common application domains to support domain mixing. In this paper, we train a Data Manager (DataMan) to learn quality ratings and domain recognition from pointwise rating, and use it to annotate a 447B token pre-training corpus with 14 quality ratings and domain type. Our experiments validate our approach, using DataMan to select 30B tokens to train a 1.3B-parameter language model, demonstrating significant improvements in in-context learning (ICL), perplexity, and instruction-following ability over the state-of-the-art baseline. The best-performing model, based on the Overall Score l=5 surpasses a model trained with 50% more data using uniform sampling. We continue pre-training with high-rated, domain-specific data annotated by DataMan to enhance domain-specific ICL performance and thus verify DataMan's domain mixing ability. Our findings emphasize the importance of quality ranking, the complementary nature of quality criteria, and their low correlation with perplexity, analyzing misalignment between PPL and ICL performance. We also thoroughly analyzed our pre-training dataset, examining its composition, the distribution of quality ratings, and the original document sources.

CLJun 20, 2024
Inference-Time Decontamination: Reusing Leaked Benchmarks for Large Language Model Evaluation

Qin Zhu, Qingyuan Cheng, Runyu Peng et al.

The training process of large language models (LLMs) often involves varying degrees of test data contamination. Although current LLMs are achieving increasingly better performance on various benchmarks, their performance in practical applications does not always match their benchmark results. Leakage of benchmarks can prevent the accurate assessment of LLMs' true performance. However, constructing new benchmarks is costly, labor-intensive and still carries the risk of leakage. Therefore, in this paper, we ask the question, Can we reuse these leaked benchmarks for LLM evaluation? We propose Inference-Time Decontamination (ITD) to address this issue by detecting and rewriting leaked samples without altering their difficulties. ITD can mitigate performance inflation caused by memorizing leaked benchmarks. Our proof-of-concept experiments demonstrate that ITD reduces inflated accuracy by 22.9% on GSM8K and 19.0% on MMLU. On MMLU, using Inference-time Decontamination can lead to a decrease in the results of Phi3 and Mistral by 6.7% and 3.6% respectively. We hope that ITD can provide more truthful evaluation results for large language models.

CLNov 23, 2021
Deps-SAN: Neural Machine Translation with Dependency-Scaled Self-Attention Network

Ru Peng, Nankai Lin, Yi Fang et al.

Syntax knowledge contributes its powerful strength in Neural machine translation (NMT) tasks. Early NMT works supposed that syntax details can be automatically learned from numerous texts via attention networks. However, succeeding researches pointed out that limited by the uncontrolled nature of attention computation, the NMT model requires an external syntax to capture the deep syntactic awareness. Although existing syntax-aware NMT methods have born great fruits in combining syntax, the additional workloads they introduced render the model heavy and slow. Particularly, these efforts scarcely involve the Transformer-based NMT and modify its core self-attention network (SAN). To this end, we propose a parameter-free, Dependency-scaled Self-Attention Network (Deps-SAN) for syntax-aware Transformer-based NMT. A quantified matrix of dependency closeness between tokens is constructed to impose explicit syntactic constraints into the SAN for learning syntactic details and dispelling the dispersion of attention distributions. Two knowledge sparsing techniques are further integrated to avoid the model overfitting the dependency noises introduced by the external parser. Experiments and analyses on IWSLT14 German-to-English and WMT16 German-to-English benchmark NMT tasks verify the effectiveness of our approach.