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.

Email / CV / Scholar / Twitter / LinkedIn

Activities

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 preprintis 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

	COMPACT: COMPositional Atomic-to-Complex Visual Capability Tuning Xindi Wu, Hee Seung Hwang, Polina Kirichenko, Olga Russakovsky preprint 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.
	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.