Minghao Sun

Minghao Sun, Chongyang Xu, Yitao Xie et al.

Multi-person 3D reconstruction is pivotal for real-world interaction analysis, yet remains challenging due to severe occlusions and depth ambiguity. Current approaches typically rely on single-modality inputs, which inherently lack geometric guidance. Furthermore, these methods often reconstruct subjects in isolation, neglecting the collective group context essential for resolving ambiguities in crowded scenes. To address these limitations, we propose Contrastive Multi-modal Hypergraph Reasoning to synergize semantic, geometric, and pose cues for crowd reconstruction. We first initialize robust node representations by combining RGB features, geometric priors, and occlusion-aware incomplete poses. Additionally, we introduce a pelvis depth indicator as a global spatial anchor, aligning visual features with a metric-scale-agnostic depth ordering. Subsequently, we construct a shared-topology hypergraph that moves beyond pairwise constraints to model higher-order crowd dynamics. To improve feature fusion, we design a hypergraph-based contrastive learning scheme that jointly enhances intra-modal discriminability and enforces cross-modal orthogonality. This mechanism enables the network to propagate global context effectively, allowing it to infer missing information even under severe occlusion. Extensive experiments on the Panoptic and GigaCrowd benchmarks confirm that our method achieves new state-of-the-art performance. Code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/SunMH-try/CoMHR.

Hanqun Cao, Hongrui Zhang, Junde Xu et al.

Protein language models (PLMs) have advanced computational protein science through large-scale pretraining and scalable architectures. In parallel, reinforcement learning (RL) has broadened exploration and enabled precise multi-objective optimization in protein design. Yet whether RL can push PLMs beyond their pretraining priors to uncover latent sequence-structure-function rules remains unclear. We address this by pairing RL with PLMs across four domains: antimicrobial peptide design, kinase variant optimization, antibody engineering, and inverse folding. Using diverse RL algorithms and model classes, we ask if RL improves sampling efficiency and, more importantly, if it reveals capabilities not captured by supervised learning. Across benchmarks, RL consistently boosts success rates and sample efficiency. Performance follows a three-factor interaction: task headroom, reward fidelity, and policy capacity jointly determine gains. When rewards are accurate and informative, policies have sufficient capacity, and tasks leave room beyond supervised baselines, improvements scale; when rewards are noisy or capacity is constrained, gains saturate despite exploration. This view yields practical guidance for RL in protein design: prioritize reward modeling and calibration before scaling policy size, match algorithm and regularization strength to task difficulty, and allocate capacity where marginal gains are largest. Implementation is available at https://github.com/chq1155/RL-PLM.

Yilian Liu, Sicong Leng, Guoshun Nan et al.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) integrate strong text reasoning with visual inputs, yet their responses can be inconsistent with the underlying images, indicating ineffective utilization of visual evidence during inference. The prevailing training paradigm relies on large-scale caption-based pretraining for general alignment, followed by supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning to enable instruction following and complex reasoning. However, such pretraining provides only weak visual grounding: short, coarse captions bias models toward salient objects while neglecting fine-grained visual evidence. In this paper, we introduce Visual Evidence Pre-Alignment (VEPA), an intermediate stage between pretraining and post-training that explores a novel sufficiency-driven objective with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to optimize question-conditioned visual evidence descriptions. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks show that our VEPA consistently enhances performance on visually demanding evaluations and complements standard supervised post-training. Further analyses show that the income stems from strengthened, transferable visual grounding, rather than from additional task-specific training.