ZGCM-1: A Fully Open and Extremely Efficient Foundation Model for Math and Agentic Search
Organizations: Zhongguancun Academy · Zhongguancun Institute of Artificial Intelligence
Abstract
In this work, we present ZGCM-1, a fully open 7B dense foundation model trained from scratch with extreme data, system, and algorithmic efficiency. ZGCM-1 is founded on a core premise: compact models cannot passively memorize the open web, but can overcome parametric capacity limits by coupling deliberate internal thinking with active external tool use. To support this paradigm across a 256K context, we develop an end-to-end, high-efficiency open training recipe: Architecture & System Co-design: interleaved gated sliding-window and full attention, and a stable FP8 Muon optimizer; Progressive Curriculum & MDP Mid-Training: context scaling across 16K, 64K, and 256K, and the reformulation of interaction traces into Markov Decision Processes. Furthermore, we establish an AI-native R&D workflow where agent swarms autonomously manage cluster operations, data curation, and rapid diagnostic evaluation. Extensive evaluations show that ZGCM-1-7B is competitive across 7B model family on general benchmarks. On several challenging mathematical reasoning and agentic search suites, it remains competitive with frontier models orders of magnitude larger, such as Qwen3-235B-A22B and GLM-5.1. We also show that our pre-training design offers a ~4.2x efficiency improvement in 16K pre-training time-to-loss. Across the full development lifecycle, we distill eight actionable empirical findings-spanning architectural scaling, SFT quality pruning, long-context generalization, and agentic co-training dynamics. To facilitate community research, we open-source model weights from the pre-training, mid-training, and post-training stages, intermediate checkpoints, training code, per-stage data and data recipes, and W&B logs.
Figures & tables
| Component | Row share | Primary role |
|---|---|---|
| General data | 96.46% | Instruction following, knowledge, mathematics, science, code, dialogue, and reasoning |
| Agentic data | 3.54% | Deep research, software engineering, and terminal interaction through structured tools |
| Total | 100.00% | All supervised fine-tuning data |
| Benchmark | ZGCM-1 [1.5pt]7B | DeepSeek-R1 [1.5pt]0528-Qwen3 [1.5pt]8B | MiniCPM [1.5pt]4.1-8B | Qwen3 [1.5pt]8B | Olmo-3-7B [1.5pt]Think | MiMo-7B [1.5pt]RL | Open [1.5pt]Thinker [1.5pt]3-7B |
| Reasoning & General | |||||||
| MATH-500 | 97.13 | 96.32 | 95.60 | 96.20 | 95.10 | 96.20 | 88.40 |
| AIME 2024 | 80.62 | 83.33 | 83.33 | 80.00 | 71.60 | 66.67 | 43.33 |
| AIME 2025 | 73.33 | 75.21 | 73.33 | 63.33 | 64.60 | 53.33 | 43.33 |
| AIME 2026 | 75.00 | 69.17 | 71.67 | 66.67 | 66.16 | 56.67 | 40.00 |
| HMMT 2025 | 70.42 | 61.50 | 52.50 | 43.33 | 43.89 | 40.00 | 23.33 |
| Model / System | WebWalkerQA | BrowseComp | GAIA text-only |
|---|---|---|---|
| Our Model | |||
| ZGCM-1-7B | 63.09 | 19.43 | 42.52 |
| Open-source Research Agent | |||
| WebDancer-32B | 38.40 | 2.50 | 40.70 |
| Open-weight Models with Tools | |||
| Qwen3-235B-A22B | 59.60 | 2.30 | 45.60 |
| Model / System | Valid submissions | Correct | Accuracy (%) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Larger frontier models | |||
| DeepSeek-V4 Flash | 50/50 | 38/50 | 76.00 |
| Qwen3.5-397B-A17B | 50/50 | 38/50 | 76.00 |
| GLM-5.1 | 50/50 | 33/50 | 66.00 |
| ZGCM-1-7B | 50/50 | 31/50 | 62.00 |
| Kimi-K2 | 50/50 | 31/50 | 62.00 |
| Level | Name | Defining criterion |
|---|---|---|
| L1 | Basic Assistance | Humans direct and execute the workflow; AI assists with individual steps. |
| L2 | Partial Automation | AI executes predefined workflows; humans specify procedures and handle exceptions. |
| L3 | Conditional Autonomy | AI adapts and manages routine workflows; consequential decisions require human approval. |
| L4 | High Autonomy | AI independently plans, executes, and iterates within human-defined objectives and constraints. |
| L5 | Full Autonomy | AI also identifies research objectives and coordinates sustained improvement across R&D stages without routine human direction. |
| Stage | Context | TP/PP/CP/DP | MBS/GBS | Recompute | LR | RoPE base | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| General pre-training | 16K | 2/1/1/96 | 1/768 | None | 5M | 60% BF16-eq. MFU ( 585 TFLOP/s/GPU) | |
| Staged (step 1) | 64K | 2/1/4/24 | 1/192 | Selective | 5M | 10B tokens | |
| Direct 256K | 256K | 2/2/4/12 | 1/48 | Full | 10M | 30B tokens; 203 TFLOP/s/GPU | |
| Staged (step 2) | 256K | 2/2/4/12 | 1/48 | Full | 10M | 20B tokens; 204 TFLOP/s/GPU |
| Benchmark | Capability | Early | Around 1.0T | Around 2.5T | Final |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| (0.04T–0.07T) | (0.91T–1.16T) | (2.29T–2.79T) | (3.67T–4.18T) | ||
| MMLU | Knowledge | 26.37 | 48.32 | 56.94 | 59.52 |
| OpenBookQA | QA | 24.80 | 60.80 | 72.40 | 78.80 |
| CSQA | QA | 19.02 | 57.70 | 64.26 | 67.87 |
| HumanEval | Code | 13.66 | 28.29 | 36.46 | 43.54 |
| GSM8K | Math | 11.52 | 38.64 | 57.12 | 59.09 |
| Benchmark | Random | Curriculum |
|---|---|---|
| Coding | 1.99 | 0.81 |
| Math | 0.97 | 0.94 |
| MMLU | 1.03 | 1.12 |
| ARC | 1.05 | 1.09 |
| HellaSwag | 1.05 | 1.08 |
| Stage | Sampled tokens | Length composition |
|---|---|---|
| 16K | 180B | 180B at 16K |
| 64K | 240B | 180.89B at 16K + 59.11B at 16K–64K |
| 256K | 180.51B | 127.81B at 16K + 21.72B at 16K–64K + 30.98B above 64K |
| Data processing | Samples | IFEval | MATH-500 | BBH | MMLU | HumanEval+ | MBPP+ | Mean (6) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Minimal processing | 2.08M | 72.64 | 74.12 | 58.49 | 72.63 | 73.78 | 55.03 | 67.78 |
| Broader filtering | 1.833M | 71.20 | 77.63 | 65.08 | 70.60 | 65.00 | 58.36 | 67.98 |
| Quality-focused filtering | 1.145M | 71.94 | 75.43 | 68.59 | 71.50 | 67.56 | 57.94 | 68.83 |
| Tool | Arguments | Return |
|---|---|---|
| search | query : nonempty string array; topn : positive integer | Ranked results containing titles, URLs, and snippets for each query. |
| visit | url : nonempty URL array; goal : natural-language information goal | Goal-directed information extracted from the requested pages. |
| Benchmark | Before mixed SFT | After mixed SFT | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| AIME 2025 | 10.00 | 43.33 | +33.33 |
| AIME 2024 | 6.67 | 33.33 | +26.66 |
| MBPP+ | 55.03 | 75.93 | +20.90 |
| BBH | 58.49 | 69.48 | +10.99 |
| LiveCodeBench v3 | 28.00 | 34.31 | +6.31 |
| IFEval | 72.64 | 78.00 | +5.36 |
| Category | Caps. | Probes | Primary evaluation scope |
|---|---|---|---|
| Agent | 8 | 120 | Environment interaction, long-horizon execution, recovery, memory, and coordinated action. |
| Arithmetic | 13 | 135 | Numerical operations, comparison, conversion, sorting, and exact calculation. |
| Causal | 5 | 75 | Mechanisms, interventions, counterfactuals, and latent-state inference. |
| Code | 26 | 389 | Program understanding, generation, debugging, optimization, testing, and artifact editing. |
| Dialogue | 6 | 90 | Multi-turn coherence, clarification, coreference, intent, persona, and subtext. |
| Instruction | 13 | 195 | Compliance with format, length, lexical, structural, stylistic, and multi-constraint requirements. |
| Level | Example probe | Expected tool arguments |
|---|---|---|
| L1 | set_timer(minutes: int) . “Start a timer for 45 minutes.” | minutes=45 |
| L2 | ship_package(weight_grams: int, speed: standard/overnight) . “Send a 2.5 kg parcel by overnight delivery.” | weight_grams=2500, speed=overnight |
| L3 | submit_order(items, shipping) . “Order 3 of SKU A100 and 2 of SKU B250, and ship them to 12 Oak Lane in Canada.” | items=[(A100,3),(B250,2)] ; shipping=(12 Oak Lane, Canada) |
| Core Contributor | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Task | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 |
| Data cleaning | L3 | L2 | L3 | L3 | L2 | L3 | L3 | L2 | L2 |
| Data acquisition | L4 | L4 | L4 | L4 | L1 | L2 | L4 | L2 | L4 |
| Synthetic data generation | L4 | L3 | L3 | L3 | L3 | L3 | L3 | L3 | L3 |
| Model architecture design | L3 | L2 | L2 | L2 | L1 | L2 | L2 | L1 | L2 |
| Learning algorithm design | L3 | L2 | L2 | L3 | L2 | L1 | L2 | L1 | L2 |
| Benchmark | ZGCM-1-7B | Olmo 3 7B Instruct | Qwen3-8B (non-thinking mode) | Qwen2.5-7B |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Reasoning & General | ||||
| MATH-500 | 89.40 | 87.30 | 82.30 | 71.00 |
| AIME 2024 | 33.33 | 44.30 | 26.20 | 11.30 |
| AIME 2025 | 43.33 | 32.50 | 21.70 | 6.30 |
| BBH | 69.48 | 71.20 | 73.70 | 68.80 |
| Code | ||||