Yanan Sun 孙亚楠

Biography

I am a Researcher at Shanghai AI Laboratory. My research focuses on large language model post-training, agentic RL and recursive self-improvement, with an emphasis on improving reasoning capabilities and enabling autonomous self-improvement.

I received my Ph.D. from The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) in 2023, advised by Prof. Chi-Keung Tang and Prof. Yu-Wing Tai. Before that, I completed my undergraduate studies in Computer Science at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2017 and worked at Tencent YouTu Lab from 2017 to 2019.

Selected Publications [Full list on Google Scholar]

^* Equal contribution (co-first authors); ^† Corresponding author.

• MegaStyle++: Scaling Image Style Space through Hierarchical Style Definition

  Junyao Gao, Sibo Liu, Jiaxing Li, Yanan Sun, Weidong Zhang, Jun Zhang, Cairong Zhao.

  arXiv preprint, 2026.

  [Paper] [Code] [Dataset]

• Is Next-Chunk Reasoning RL Really Better than SFT? Revisiting Training Strategies under no-CoT Data

  Yinhao Tang, Youqing Fang, Yanan Sun^†, Jiangning Liu, Ziyi Wang, Xun Zhao, Weiming Zhang, Bin Liu, Kuikun Liu, Wenwei Zhang, Kai Chen.

  Corresponding author

  Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2026.

  [Paper]

• Intern-S2-Preview: Scientific Agentic Foundation Model

  Lei Bai, Jiaqi Cao, Chiyu Chen, …, Yanan Sun, …, Yicheng Zou.

  Technical report, 2026.

  [Paper] [GitHub] [Hugging Face]

• SciExplore: Evaluating Autonomous Agents from Scientific Navigation to Information Integration

  Yinhao Tang, Youqing Fang, Yanan Sun^†, Wenran Liu, Weiming Zhang, Bin Liu, Kuikun Liu, Wenwei Zhang, Kai Chen.

  Corresponding author

  Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2026.

  [Paper]

• Human-Agent Collaborative Paper-to-Page Crafting

  Qianli Ma, Siyu Wang, Yilin Chen, Yinhao Tang, Yixiang Yang, Chang Guo, Bingjie Gao, Zhening Xing, Yanan Sun, Zhipeng Zhang.

  Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2026.

  [Paper] [Code]

• MindCopilot: Towards Formalizing and Evaluating Granular Human-LLM Co-Writing

  Youqing Fang, Yinhao Tang, Yanan Sun^†, Jiangning Liu, Ziyi Wang, Xun Zhao, Bin Liu, Weiming Zhang, Kuikun Liu, Wenwei Zhang, Kai Chen.

  Corresponding author

  arXiv preprint, 2026.

  [Paper] [Code]

• TREX: Automating LLM Fine-tuning via Agent-Driven Tree-based Exploration

  Zerun Ma, Guoqiang Wang, Xinchen Xie, Yicheng Chen, He Du, Bowen Li, Yanan Sun, Wenran Liu, Kai Chen, Yining Li.

  arXiv preprint, 2026.

  [Paper] [GitHub] [FT-Bench]

• MegaStyle: Constructing Diverse and Scalable Style Dataset via Consistent Text-to-Image Style Mapping

  Junyao Gao, Sibo Liu, Jiaxing Li, Yanan Sun, Yuanpeng Tu, Fei Shen, Weidong Zhang, Cairong Zhao, Jun Zhang.

  arXiv preprint, 2026.

  [Paper] [Code] [Project] [Hugging Face] [Dataset]

• Test-Time Correction: An Online 3D Detection System via Visual Prompting

  Hanxue Zhang, Zetong Yang, Yanan Sun, Li Chen, Fei Xia, Fatma Güney, Hongyang Li.

  IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI), 2026.

  [Paper] [arXiv]

• StyleShot: A Snapshot on Any Style

  Junyao Gao, Yanan Sun^†, Yanchen Liu, Yinhao Tang, Yanhong Zeng, Ding Qi, Kai Chen, Cairong Zhao.

  Corresponding author

  IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI), 2026.

  [Paper] [Code] [Project]

• LEGO-Puzzles: How Good Are MLLMs at Multi-Step Spatial Reasoning?

  Kexian Tang, Junyao Gao, Yanhong Zeng, Haodong Duan, Yanan Sun, Zhening Xing, Wenran Liu, Kai Chen, Kaifeng Lyu.

  arXiv preprint, 2025.

  [Paper] [Code]

• MotionShot: Adaptive Motion Transfer across Arbitrary Objects for Text-to-Video Generation

  Yanchen Liu, Yanan Sun^†, Zhening Xing, Junyao Gao, Kai Chen, Wenjie Pei.

  Corresponding author

  IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2025.

  [Paper]

• Detect Anything 3D in the Wild

  Hanxue Zhang, Haoran Jiang, Qingsong Yao, Yanan Sun, Renrui Zhang, Hao Zhao, Hongyang Li, Hongzi Zhu, Zetong Yang.

  IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2025.

  [Paper] [Code]

• FaceShot: Bring Any Character into Life

  Junyao Gao, Yanan Sun^†, Fei Shen, Xin Jiang, Zhening Xing, Kai Chen, Cairong Zhao.

  Corresponding author

  International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2025.

  [Paper] [Code] [Project]

• CharacterShot: Controllable and Consistent 4D Character Animation

  Junyao Gao, Jiaxing Li, Wenran Liu, Yanhong Zeng, Fei Shen, Kai Chen, Yanan Sun^†, Cairong Zhao.

  Corresponding author

  arXiv preprint, 2025.

  [Paper] [Code]

• AnyControl: Create Your Artwork with Versatile Control on Text-to-Image Generation

  Yanan Sun, Yanchen Liu, Yinhao Tang, Wenjie Pei, Kai Chen.

  European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2024.

  [Paper] [Code] [Project] [Hugging Face]

• Visual Point Cloud Forecasting Enables Scalable Autonomous Driving

  Zetong Yang, Li Chen, Yanan Sun, Hongyang Li.

  IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024.

  [Paper] [Code]

• Semantic Image Matting: General and Specific Semantics

  Yanan Sun^†, Chi-Keung Tang, Yu-Wing Tai.

  Corresponding author

  International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV), 2024.

  [Paper] [Code]

• Ultrahigh Resolution Image/Video Matting with Spatio-Temporal Sparsity

  Yanan Sun, Chi-Keung Tang, Yu-Wing Tai.

  IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2023.

  [Paper] [Code]

• Human Instance Matting via Mutual Guidance and Multi-Instance Refinement

  Yanan Sun, Chi-Keung Tang, Yu-Wing Tai.

  IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2022. Oral presentation.

  [Paper] [Code]

• A Unified Query-Based Paradigm for Point Cloud Understanding

  Zetong Yang, Li Jiang, Yanan Sun, Bernt Schiele, Jiaya Jia.

  IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2022.

  [Paper] [Code]

• Semantic Image Matting

  Yanan Sun, Chi-Keung Tang, Yu-Wing Tai.

  IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021.

  [Paper] [Code]

• Deep Video Matting via Spatio-Temporal Alignment and Aggregation

  Yanan Sun, Guanzhi Wang, Qiao Gu, Chi-Keung Tang, Yu-Wing Tai.

  IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021.

  [Paper] [Code]

• 3DSSD: Point-Based 3D Single Stage Object Detector

  Zetong Yang, Yanan Sun, Shu Liu, Jiaya Jia.

  IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020. Oral presentation.

  [Paper] [Code]

• GSNet: Joint Vehicle Pose and Shape Reconstruction with Geometrical and Scene-Aware Supervision

  Lei Ke, Shichao Li, Yanan Sun, Yu-Wing Tai, Chi-Keung Tang.

  European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020.

  [Paper] [Code]

• CN: Channel Normalization for Point Cloud Recognition

  Zetong Yang^*, Yanan Sun^*, Shu Liu, Xiaojuan Qi, Jiaya Jia.

  European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020.

  [Paper]

• STD: Sparse-to-Dense 3D Object Detector for Point Cloud

  Zetong Yang, Yanan Sun, Shu Liu, Xiaoyong Shen, Jiaya Jia.

  IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2019.

  [Paper]

Experience

Education

Academic Service

Conference Reviewer

• Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
• Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
• IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)
• IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)
• European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV)
• Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS)
• International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)
• ACM International Conference on Multimedia (ACM MM)
• British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC)
• ACM Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques (SIGGRAPH)

Journal Reviewer

• IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI)
• International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV)
• IEEE Transactions on Image Processing (TIP)

Honors & Awards

• Postdoctoral Innovative Talent Support Program2025 – Present
• Shanghai Overseas High-Level Talent Recruitment Program2024 – 2027
• Hong Kong Postgraduate Scholarship2019 – 2023
• Outstanding Graduate of Shanghai Jiao Tong University2017
• National Scholarship2013 – 2017