Minghao Sun (Lawrence)

PhD Candidate · Department of Computer Science
National University of Singapore

I am a PhD candidate in the Department of Computer Science at the National University of Singapore (NUS), advised by Prof. Yang Zhang and supported by the President's Graduate Fellowship (PGF).

I received my bachelor's degree from Zhejiang University (ZJU).

Email: minghao [dot] sun [at] u [dot] nus [dot] edu

Google Scholar · LinkedIn

Taken at Hong Kong Museum of Art 香港藝術館

Research

My research focuses on agent learning and self-improvement through scalable environments and reliable feedback, with three connected directions:

Learning from experience. How can agents learn from interaction and feedback, accumulate useful knowledge, and generalize across tasks?
Scalable environments and self-improving systems. How can environments and feedback scale to support autonomous learning and sustained improvement in agent capabilities?
AI for Science. How can learning from feedback and self-improvement advance scientific foundation models and scientific discovery, particularly in RNA and protein design?

News

[2026/09] Two papers accepted at NeurIPS 2026.
[2026/05] One paper accepted at KDD 2026 AI4Science Track.

Selected Publications (Google Scholar)

* equal contribution · † corresponding author

NeurIPS’26

RiboPO: Preference Optimization for Structure- and Stability-Aware RNA Design. [Paper]

Minghao Sun^*, Hanqun Cao^*, Zhou Zhang^*, Chen Wei, Liang Wang, Tianrui Jia, Zhiyuan Liu, Tianfan Fu, Xiangru Tang, Yejin Choi, Pheng-Ann Heng, Fang Wu^†, Yang Zhang^†

NeurIPS’26E&D Track

Multi-Oracle Agreement Reveals the Limits of Self-Consistency Evaluation in RNA Design. [Paper]

Minghao Sun, Hanqun Cao, Fang Wu, Zhou Zhang, Zhiyuan Liu, Tianfan Fu, Pheng-Ann Heng, Yang Zhang^†

KDD’26AI4Science

The Forgetting-Learning Trade-off: Making Reinforcement Learning Work for Protein Language Models. [Paper]

Hanqun Cao^*, Hongrui Zhang^*, Junde Xu, Zhou Zhang, Lingdong Shen, Minghao Sun, Ge Liu, Jinbo Xu, Wu-Jun Li, Jinren Ni, Cesar de la Fuente-Nunez, Tianfan Fu, Shuting Jin, Pheng-Ann Heng, Fang Wu^†

eLife

ProteinConformers: large-scale and energetically profiled descriptions of protein conformational landscapes. [Paper]

Yihang Zhou^*, Chen Wei^*, Minghao Sun, Lin Wang, Jin Song, Fanding Xu, Yang Li, Wei Zheng, Yang Zhang^†

arXiv2026

Ligand-Conditioned Discrete Diffusion for Protein Sequence–Structure Co-Design. [Paper]

Chen Wei, Fanding Xu, Minghao Sun, Zhiyuan Liu, Lin Wang, Tianrui Jia, Yihang Zhou^†, Yang Zhang^†

NeurIPS’25D&B Track

ProteinConformers: Benchmark Dataset for Simulating Protein Conformational Landscape Diversity and Plausibility. [Paper]

Yihang Zhou^*, Chen Wei^*, Minghao Sun, Jin Song, Yang Li, Lin Wang^†, Yang Zhang^†

Academic Services

Reviewer. ICML 2026 (Gold Reviewer), NeurIPS 2026, ICLR 2027, AAAI 2027.

Co-Reviewer. Nature Communications (Early Career Researcher, ECR).

Mentoring. Chelsea Yep (NUS CS Master's Student).