Kun Xiang avatar

Kun Xiang (项鲲)

PhD Candidate @ Sun Yat-sen University

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About Me

Thanks for stopping by! 👋

I am currently a PhD candidate at the HCP-I2 Lab in Sun Yat-sen University advised by Prof. Xiaodan Liang. Previously, I obtained both my Bachelor’s and Master’s degree at SYSU under the supervision of Prof. Shancheng Jiang.

Currently, I am interested in building generalizable multimodal reasoning systems grounded from data-centric perspective. I am working to answer:

1) Inward: How can VLMs enhance perception and reasoning for real-world comprehension?

2) Outward: How can they facilitate modeling and interaction for physical engagement?

News
  • [2025.10] Our work (AI4Physics), a survey to aligning perception, reasoning, modeling and interaction capabilities on physical AI, is on Arxiv!
  • [2025.09] One paper (SeePhys) accepted by NeurIPS 2025! See you in San Diego!
  • [2025.05] Code and Dataset of SeePhys have been released. Welcome to try!
  • [2025.05] Our work (SeePhys), a full spectrum multimodal benchmark for evaluating physics reasoning across different knowledge levels, is on Arxiv!
  • [2025.05] We organize a challenge for the 2nd AI for Math Workshop at ICML 2025. Welcome to try!
  • [2024.12] Our work (AtomThink), an o1 style reasoning framework via long CoT for complex multimodal mathematical tasks, is on Arxiv!
Selected Publications

Full publication list on Google Scholar. (* denotes equal contribution)

alignment.png

Aligning Perception, Reasoning, Modeling and Interaction: A Survey on Physical AI

Kun Xiang*, Terry Jingchen Zhang*, Yinya Huang*, Jixi He, and 12 more authors

A survey charting the path toward AI that understands and reasons about the physical world!

Arxiv preprint, 2025

[PDF] [Project Page]
seephys.png

SeePhys: Does Seeing Help Thinking? – Benchmarking Vision-Based Physics Reasoning

Kun Xiang*, Heng Li*, Terry Jingchen Zhang*, Yinya Huang*, and 10 more authors

A full spectrum multimodal benchmark for evaluating visual physics reasoning!

Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2025.

[PDF] [Project Page] [Code] [Challenge (ICML Workshop)] [Dataset] GitHub Repo stars
atomthink.png

AtomThink: Multimodal Slow Thinking with Atomic Step Reasoning

Kun Xiang*, Zhili Liu*, Terry Jingchen Zhang, Yinya Huang, and 6 more authors

Adaptive slow thinking for multimodal AI through atomic-step reasoning!

Arxiv preprint, 2024

[PDF] [Code] GitHub Repo stars

EMOVA: Empowering Language Models to See, Hear and Speak with Vivid Emotions

Kai Chen*, Yunhao Gou*, Runhui Huang*, Zhili Liu*, Daxin Tan* and other 26 authors

Fully open-sourced Omni-modal LLMs with SoTA vision-language and speech abilities!

IEEE/CVF Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference (CVPR), 2025

[PDF] [Webpage] [Talk] [Talk (Chinese)] [Wechat Post] [Code] GitHub Repo stars
xiang2023toward.png

Toward robust diagnosis: A contour attention preserving adversarial defense for covid-19 detection

Kun Xiang, Xing Zhang, Jinwen She, Jinpeng Liu, and 3 more authors

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2023

[PDF] [Code]
xiang2021novel.png

A novel weight pruning strategy for light weight neural networks with application to the diagnosis of skin disease

Kun Xiang, Linlin Peng, Haiqiong Yang, Mingxin Li, and 3 more authors

Applied Soft Computing, 2021

[PDF]
Academic Services
Reviewer:
  • Conference: NeurIPS 2025, AAAI 2025, AAAI 2024
  • Journal: IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems, IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics, Information Sciences, Applied Soft Computing
Teaching Assistant:
  • Computer Vision, ISE3135, Autumn 2024-2025
  • Operations Research, ISE311, Autumn 2021-2022
  • Data Structure and Algorithm, ISE229, Autumn 2022-2023.
Community Activities:
  • Minister, Student Union of SYSU
  • Member, Youth Volunteer Association of SYSU
Experiences
Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab (Computer Vision group)
July. 2024 - July. 2025
Research Intern, working with Hang Xu
Sangfor Technologies Inc.
Apr. 2021 - Aug. 2021
Research Intern, working with Jingyan Jiang
Selected Awards

Outstanding Graduate of SYSU

2024

National Scholarship

2022

Postgraduate Scholarship of SYSU

2021