Education

  • Columbia University Ph.D. 2014
  • Columbia University M.Phil. 2013
  • Columbia University M.S. 2011
  • Hohai University B.S.E. 2010

Work Experience

  • Full Professor with Tenure Renmin University of China Beijing 2025-present
  • Associate Professor with Tenure Renmin University of China Beijing 2021-2025
  • Affiliate Professor Northeastern University Boston MA 2021-present
  • Assistant Professor Northeastern University Boston MA 2018-2021
  • Assistant Professor University of Pittsburgh Pittsburgh PA 2017-2018
  • Research Affiliate MIT Cambridge MA 2017-present
  • Teaching Fellow MIT Cambridge MA 2016-2017
  • Postdoctoral Associate MIT Cambridge MA 2014-2017
  • Research/Teaching Assistant Columbia University New York NY 2010-2014

RESEARCH INTERESTS

(1) mathematical and physical foundation of AI and its interdisciplinary applications
(2) interpretable machine/deep learning
(3) knowledge representation learning and reasoning
(4) physics-informed deep learning
(5) symbolic reinforcement learning and reasoning
(6) data-driven discovery of governing laws

Prospective Students/Staffs

Always having openings for undergraduate master and doctoral students as well as postdoc researchers!!

Ph.D. Students under Prof. Sun's Supervision:
Yuan Mi Renmin University of China (Ph.D. student 2021-present)
Zitong Zhang Renmin University of China (Ph.D. student 2021-present)
Fangzheng (Andy) Sun Northeastern University (Ph.D. student 2019-present)
Pu Ren Northeastern University (Ph.D. student 2019-present)
R. Bailey Bond Northeastern University (Ph.D. student co-advised 2019-present)
Chengping Rao Northeastern University (Ph.D. student co-advised 2018-present)
Lele Luan Northeastern University (Ph.D. student 2018-present)
Zhao Chen Northeastern University (Ph.D. student 2017-2021; now Postdoc Associate at PNNL)

Teaching

  • Interdisciplinary Thinking and Practice of Artificial Intelligence

Research Projects

National Science Foundation (No. 2013067 $600000) PI
National Science Foundation (No. 2125326 $1500000) Co-PI
National Science Foundation (No. 2053741 $400000) Co-PI
Federal Railway Administration ($330000) Co-PI
Association of American Railroads ($350000) Co-PI
MathWorks Micro-grant ($25000) PI
Northeastern University Tier-1 Project ($50000) PI

PUBLICATIONS

2026
Spatiotemporal graph learning with direct volumetric information passing and feature enhancement
Yuan Mi, Qi Wang, Xueqin Hu, Yike Guo, Ji-Rong Wen, Yang Liu, Hao Sun*
Proceedings of the 32st ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD)
Reducing Symmetry Increase in Equivariant Neural Networks
Ning Lin, Jiacheng Cen, Anyi Li, Wenbing Huang*, Hao Sun*
The 14th International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)
CloDS: Visual-Only Unsupervised Cloth Dynamics Learning in Unknown Conditions
Yu-Liang Zhan, Jian Li, Wenbing Huang, Yang Liu, Hao Sun*
The 14th International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)
L2V-CoT: Cross-modal transfer of chain-of-thought reasoning via latent intervention
Yuliang Zhan, Xinyu Tang, Han Wan, Jian Li, Ji-Rong Wen, Hao Sun*
The 40th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)【Oral】
Differentiable sparse identification of Lagrangian dynamics
Zitong Zhang, Hao Sun*
The 40th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)【Oral】
PIMRL: Physics-Informed Multi-Scale Recurrent Learning for burst-sampled spatiotemporal dynamics
Han Wan, Qi Wang, Yuan Mi, Rui Zhang*, H. Sun*
The 40th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)
Equivariant Hamiltonian graph neural networks for generalizing dynamics of magnetic pendulum system
Zitong Zhang, Hao Sun*
The IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP)
STPhyNet: Physics-integrated spatiotemporal neural networks for efficient PDE simulation
Qi Wang, Mengtao Yan, Hao Zhou, Ji-Rong Wen, Hao Sun
The IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP)
Evaluating LLMs' scientific creativity capabilities and idea generation with minimal context
Kai Ruan, Xuan Wang, Jixiang Hong, Peng Wang, Yang Liu, Hao Sun*
Nature Communications [accepted]
Discovering physical laws with parallel symbolic enumeration
Kai Ruan, Yilong Xu, Ze-Feng Gao, Yang Liu, Yike Guo, Ji-Rong Wen, Hao Sun*
Nature Computational Science, 6(1): 53-66【封面文章】
2025
FlexWorld: Progressively expanding 3D scenes for flexiable-view synthesis
Luxi Chen, Zihan Zhou, Min Zhao, Yikai Wang, Ge Zhang, Wenhao Huang, Hao Sun, Ji-Rong Wen, Chongxuan Li
Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS)
MultiPDENet: PDE-embedded learning with multi-time-stepping for accelerated flow simulation
Qi Wang, Yuan Mi, Haoyun Wang, Yi Zhang, Ruizhi Chengze, Hongsheng Liu, Ji-Rong Wen, Hao Sun*
The 42nd International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML)
PhyMPGN: Physics-encoded Message Passing Graph Network for spatiotemporal PDE systems
Bocheng Zeng, Qi Wang, Mengtao Yan, Yang Liu, Ruizhi Chengze, Yi Zhang, Hongsheng Liu, Zidong Wang, Hao Sun*
The 13th International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), Spotlight
PINP: Physics-Informed Neural Predictor with latent estimation of fluid flows
Huaguan Chen, Yang Liu, Hao Sun*
The 13th International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)
EyEar: Learning audio synchronized human gaze trajectory based on physics-informed dynamics
Xiaochuan Liu, Xin Cheng, Yuchong Sun, Xiaoxue Wu, Ruihua Song*, Hao Sun*, Denghao Zhang*
Proceedings of the 39th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), Oral
PeSANet: Physics-encoded spectral attention network for simulating PDE-governed complex systems
Han Wan, Rui Zhang, Qi Wang, Yang Liu, Hao Sun*
Proceedings of the 34th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI)
Learnable-differentiable finite volume solver for accelerated simulation of flows
Mengtao Yan, Qi Wang, Haining Wang, Ruizhi Chengze, Yi Zhang, Hongsheng Liu, Zidong Wang, Fan Yu, Qi Qi, Hao Sun*
The 31st ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD)
SlotPi: Physics-informed object-centric reasoning models
Jian Li, Wan Han, Ning Lin, Yu-Liang Zhan, Ruizhi Chengze, Haining Wang, Yi Zhang, Hongsheng Liu, Zidong Wang, Fan Yu, Hao Sun*
The 31st ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD)
AI-accelerated discovery of altermagnetic materials
Ze-Feng Gao, Shuai Qu, Bocheng Zeng, Ji-Rong Wen, Hao Sun*, Peng-Jie Guo*, Zhong-Yi Lu*
National Science Review, 12(4): nwaf066
Reasoning-enhanced object-centric learning for videos
Jian Li, Pu Ren, Yang Liu, Hao Sun*
The 31st ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD)
Conservation-informed graph learning for spatio-temporal dynamics prediction
Yuan Mi, Pu Ren, Hongteng Xu, Hongsheng Liu, Zidong Wang, Yike Guo, Ji-Rong Wen, Hao Sun*, Yang Liu*
The 31st ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD)
2024
Learning spatiotemporal dynamics with a pretrained generative model
Zeyu Li, Wang Han, Yue Zhang, Qingfei Fu, Jingxuan Li, Lizi Qin, Ruoyu Dong, Hao Sun*, Yue Deng*, Lijun Yang*
Nature Machine Intelligence, 6: 1566-1579
Over-parameterized student model via tensor decomposition boosted knowledge distillation
Yu-Liang Zhan, Zhong-Yi Lu, Hao Sun*, Ze-Feng Gao*
Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS)
P2C2Net: PDE-Preserved Coarse Correction Network for efficient prediction of spatiotemporal dynamics
Qi Wang, Pu Ren, Hao Zhou, Xin-Yang Liu, Zhiwen Deng, Yi Zhang, Ruizhi Chengze, Hongsheng Liu, Zidong Wang, Jian-Xun Wang, Ji-Rong Wen, Hao Sun*, Yang Liu*
Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS)
SeismicNet: Physics-informed neural networks for seismic wave modeling in semi-infinite domain
Pu Ren, Chengping Rao, Su Chen, Jian-Xun Wang, Hao Sun*, Yang Liu*
Computer Physics Communications, 295: 109010
Vision-based discovery of nonlinear dynamics for 3D moving target
Zitong Zhang, Yang Liu, Hao Sun*
The 32nd International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI)
Reinforcement symbolic regression machine
Yilong Xu, Yang Liu, Hao Sun*
The Twelfth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)
2023
PhySR: Physics-informed deep super-resolution for spatiotemporal data
Pu Ren, Chengping Rao, Yang Liu, Zihan Ma, Qi Wang, Jian-Xun Wang, H Sun*
Journal of Computational Physics, 492: 112438
Encoding physics to learn reaction-diffusion processes
Chengping Rao, Pu Ren, Qi Wang, Oral Buyukozturk, Hao Sun*, Yang Liu*
Nature Machine Intelligence, 5: 765–779
Symbolic Physics Learner: Discovering governing equations via Monte Carlo tree search
Fangzheng Sun, Yang Liu, Jian-Xun Wang, Hao Sun*
The 11th International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), Oral
2022
Towards artificial general intelligence via a multimodal foundation model
Nanyi Fei, Zhiwu Lu*, Yizhao Gao, Guoxing Yang, Yuqi Huo, Jingyuan Wen, Haoyu Lu, Ruihua Song, Xin Gao, Tao Xiang, Hao Sun*, Ji-Rong Wen*
Nature Communications, 13: 3094
Bayesian Spline Learning for Equation Discovery of Nonlinear Dynamics with Quantified Uncertainty
Luning Sun, Daniel Zhengyu Huang, Hao Sun, Jian-Xun Wang
Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS)
Autoregressive matrix factorization for imputation and forecasting of spatiotemporal structural monitoring time series
Peijie Zhang, Pu Ren, Yang Liu, Hao Sun
Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing, 169, 108718
Forecasting of nonlinear dynamics based on symbolic invariance
Zhao Chen, Yang Liu, Hao Sun*
Computer Physics Communications, 277, 108382
Towards Artificial General Intelligence via a Multimodal Foundation Model
Nanyi Fei, Zhiwu Lu*, Yizhao Gao, Guoxing Yang, Yuqi Huo, Jingyuan Wen, Haoyu Lu, Ruihua Song, Xin Gao, Tao Xiang, Hao Sun*, Ji-Rong Wen*
Nature Communications, 13, 3094
Distilling Governing Laws and Source Input for Dynamical Systems from Videos
Lele Luan, Yang Liu, Hao Sun*
Proceedings of the 31st International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI)
PhyCRNet: Physics-informed convolutional-recurrent network for solving spatiotemporal PDEs
Pu Ren, Chengping Rao, Yang Liu, Jian-Xun Wang, Hao Sun
Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering, 389: 114399
Discovering Nonlinear PDEs from Scarce Data with Physics-encoded Learning
Chengping Rao, Pu Ren, Yang Liu, Hao Sun*
The 10th International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)
2021
Incremental Bayesian matrix/tensor learning for structural monitoring data imputation and response forecasting
Pu Ren, Xinyu Chen, Lijun Sun, Hao Sun*
Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing, 158, 107734
Physics-informed learning of governing equations from scarce data
Zhao Chen, Yang Liu*, Hao Sun*
Nature Communications, 12: 6136
Physics-informed Spline Learning for Nonlinear Dynamics Discovery
Fangzheng Sun, Yang Liu, Hao Sun
Proceedings of the Thirtieth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI)
2020
Physics-informed multi-LSTM networks for metamodeling of nonlinear structures
Ruiyang Zhang, Yang Liu, Hao Sun*
Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering, 369: 113226

Honors and Awards

  • 2018 Forbes 30 Under 30: Science 2018 (Citation: Hao Sun's research uses analytics and machine learning combined with internet-of-things enabled sensors to track of the health of buildings and detect reparable damage before there's a bigger catastrophe. His team has built a prototype system allowing them to observe ambient vibrations affecting the building and modeling its structural health.)
  • 2019 Top Ten Outstanding Chinese American Youth Award (The theme of this selection campaign is: "Inheritance and Innovation".)

Contact

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Email：haosun@ruc.edu.cn

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