Will Hwang

Hi! I'm a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at Princeton University, where I am advised by Prof. Olga Russakovsky. My research interest lies in multimodal learning, particularly in the intersection of computer vision and natural language processing. I am currently working on applying reinforcement learning to improve reasoning capabilities of Multimodal LLMs. I received my BS and MS at the University of Chicago.

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Activities

02-2026: ReFINE (Reinforced Fast Weights with Next-Sequence Prediction) preprint is posted on arXiv.
01-2026: COMPACT has been accepted to ICLR 2026.
11-2025: Our work on FinnGen is posted on medRXiv.
10-2025: Our work on NRIP1 R448G has been accepted to PNAS.
08-2025: I will be serving as an instructor for Princeton AI4ALL
06-2025: We are excited to present COMPACT at various workshops at CVPR 2025!
04-2025: COMPACT preprint is posted on arXiv.
04-2025: Our work on doubly exponential learning is accepted to CogSci 2025.
08-2024: Starting my Ph.D at Princeton.
10-2023: Our work on FinnGen single-cell multiome and immunophenotyping has been presented at ASHG 2023.
07-2022: Starting as a Computational Associate at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.

Research

	ReFINE: Reinforced Fast Weights with Next-Sequence Prediction Hee Seung Hwang, Xindi Wu, Sanghyuk Chun, Olga Russakovsky preprint We present next-sequence prediction as a training objective for improving long-context modeling of fast weight architectures.
	COMPACT: COMPositional Atomic-to-Complex Visual Capability Tuning Xindi Wu, Hee Seung Hwang, Polina Kirichenko, Olga Russakovsky ICLR, 2026 We present a compositional, complexity-aware VIT data recipe to improve visual reasoning in MLLMs.
	Learning a Doubly-Exponential Number of Concepts From Few Examples Ilia Sucholutsky, Bonan Zhao, Hee Seung Hwang, Allison Chen, Olga Russakovsky, Tom Griffiths CogSci, 2025 We present a novel minimal paradigm that explores how efficiently people can simultaneously learn visual and symbolic concepts.
	Population-scale multiome immune cell atlas reveals complex disease drivers Masahiro Kanai, Toni M Delorey, Jarno Honkanen, Rodosthenis S Rodosthenous, Julianna Juvila, Shane Murphy, Isabella Teixeira-Soldano, Hee Seung Hwang, Juha Karjalainen, Jussi Halonen, Georgia Panagiotaropoulou, Yuanxiang Zhang, Cristin McCabe, Eric Chen, Kosaku Nanki, Toshimi Yoshida, Kai Liu, Marla Glean, Nitya Mehrotra, Emily P Finan, Daniel Chafamo, Yixiao Zhu, Mikko Arvas, Sanni Ruotsalainen, Zhili Zheng, FinnGen, Mary P Reeve, Mitja Kurki, Caroline BM Porter, Orr Ashenberg, Wei Zhou, Kimmo Pitkänen, Jukka Partanen, Aarno Palotie, Daniel B Graham, Mark J Daly, Ramnik J. Xavier preprint We show that population-scale simultaneous profiling of chromatin accessibility and gene expression across immune cell types reveals multi-layered regulatory pathways connecting genetic variants to disease.
	Nuclear receptor coregulator NRIP1 R448G modulates T cell gut homing to control intestinal inflammation Xiangjun Chen, Hee Seung Hwang, Bihua Li, Yanhua Zhao, Koushik Ghosh, Lei Deng, Elizabeth A. Creasey, Orr Ashenberg, Daniel B. Graham, Ramnik J. Xavier PNAS, 122, 2025 We show that NRIP1 R448G leads to intestinal inflammation by activating T cell gut homing and inflammatory cytokine production.

Teaching

AI4ALL Instructor: Princeton University, July 2025
Teaching Assistant: Computer Vision (CS429), Fall 2025
Mentorship: I am continuing to mentor students I've met along the way. Feel free to reach out!

Credit: Jon Baron.