CV

Education

B.S. in Mathematics and Applied Mathematics, Ocean University of China (OUC), Qingdao, China, Sep. 2023–Present
- GPA: 86/100 (3.5/4.0)
- Core coursework: Data Structures (99/100), Mathematical Analysis (98/100), Higher Algebra (97/100)

Research Experience

Rice University, Houston, TX, USA — Research Assistant, Adviser: Prof. Wei Qiu (Jun. 2026–Present)
- Developed PerDFKD, a source-data-free knowledge-distillation framework that reconstructs personalized ECG teachers and transfers their knowledge to lightweight student models for efficient deployment.
Nanyang Technological University, Singapore — Research Assistant, Adviser: Prof. Wei Dong (Jul. 2025–Sep. 2025)
- Proposed a non-transferable-learning framework for vision-language models to prevent unauthorized fine-tuning and intellectual-property exploitation while preserving utility on authorized tasks.

Teaching and Mentoring Experience

Ocean University of China, Qingdao, China — Teaching Assistant, Algorithms and Data Structures (Sep. 2025–Jan. 2026)
- Conducted weekly office hours and Q&A sessions, provided debugging guidance, and evaluated programming assignments and examinations.

Publications

NüshuVoice: Reviving the Voice of Endangered Nüshu with Pitch-Aware Text-to-Speech

Published in Under Review, 2026

Hongkun Yang, Xinhui Yi, Xiyan Zhao, Yibo Meng, Lionel Z. Wang, Lixu Wang, Yaqi Zhang, Ruiqi Chen, Xuanyue Zhao, Lanxin Zhang, Yu Zeng, Weijia Chu, Yiming Ma, Chenyu Liu, Jianghao Lin, Xin Xu
Under review. Built the first Nüshu TTS benchmark and contributed to the pitch-aware Nüshu-PitchVITS framework. View paper

PerDFKD: Source-Data-Free Knowledge Distillation for Efficient Personalized ECG Adaptation

Published in Under Review at KDD 2027, 2026

Hongkun Yang, Yilin Song, Wei Qiu.
Under review at KDD 2027.

DeAR: Fine-Grained VLM Adaptation by Decomposing Attention Head Roles

Published in CVPR 2026, 2026

Yiming Ma^*, Hongkun Yang^*, Lionel Z. Wang, et al. Accepted at CVPR 2026. (^*Equal contribution.)

AppellateGen: A Benchmark for Appellate Legal Judgment Generation

Published in Under Review, 2026

Hongkun Yang, Lionel Z. Wang, Wei Fan, et al.
Under review. Built the benchmark, developed the SOP-based multi-agent system, and led evaluations and writing. View paper