Hi! I'm

Ruihong

AI Undergrad '27

  • Intuitive physics
  • World models

Ruihong Shen | 沈睿弘

shen.ruihong [at] stu.pku.edu.cn

Hi! I'm ruihong, a junior student in Zhi Class 2023 at the School of Electronics Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) of Peking University. I am pursuing a degree in Intelligence Science and Technology while also pursuing a dual degree in Psychology. I am currently advised by Prof. Yixin Zhu at Cognitive Reasoning (CoRe) Lab, Peking University.

My current research interest lies in intuitive physics and world models, with the goal of equipping AI agents with human-like physical commonsense to better interact with our physical world.

Feel free to reach out if you have any comments, questions about me, my research, or anything else! 🥺

News

[2026/04] One paper is accepted by CogSci 2026.

[2026/01] Two papers are accepted by ICLR 2026.

Research

* Joint first author Corresponding author

Overhang Tower project teaser

Overhang Tower: Resource-Rational Adaptation in Sequential Physical Planning

Ruihong Shen, Shiqian Li, Yixin Zhu

The 48th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2026)

Humans effortlessly navigate the physical world by predicting how objects behave under gravity and contact forces, yet how such judgments support sequential physical planning under resource constraints remains poorly understood. Research on intuitive physics debates whether prediction relies on the Intuitive Physics Engine (IPE) or fast, cue-based heuristics; separately, decision-making research debates deliberative lookahead versus myopic strategies. These debates have proceeded in isolation, leaving the cognitive architecture of sequential physical planning underspecified. How physical prediction mechanisms and planning strategies jointly adapt under limited cognitive resources remains an open question. Here we show that humans exhibit a dual transition under resource pressure, simultaneously shifting both physical prediction mechanism and planning strategy to match cognitive budget. Using Overhang Tower, a construction task requiring participants to maximize horizontal overhang while maintaining stability, we find that IPE-based simulation dominates early stages while CNN-based visual heuristics prevail as complexity grows; concurrently, time pressure truncates deliberative lookahead, shifting planning toward shallower horizons: a dual transition unpredicted by prior single-mechanism accounts. These findings reveal a hierarchical, resource-rational architecture that flexibly trades computational cost against predictive fidelity. Our results unify two long-standing debates (simulation vs. heuristics and myopic vs. deliberative planning) as a dynamic repertoire reconfigured by cognitive budget.

Neural Gaussian Force Field teaser

Learning Physics-Grounded 4D Dynamics with Neural Gaussian Force Fields

Shiqian Li*, Ruihong Shen*, Junfeng Ni, Chang Pan, Chi Zhang, Yixin Zhu

The 14th International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2026)

Predicting physical dynamics from visual data remains a fundamental challenge in AI, as it requires both accurate scene understanding and robust physics reasoning. While recent video generation models achieve impressive visual quality, they lack explicit physics modeling and frequently violate fundamental laws like gravity and object permanence. Existing approaches combining 3D Gaussian splatting with traditional physics engines achieve physical consistency but suffer from prohibitive computational costs and struggle with complex real-world multi-object interactions. The key challenge lies in developing a unified framework that learns physics-grounded representations directly from visual observations while maintaining computational efficiency and generalization capability. Here we introduce NGFF, an end-to-end neural framework that learns explicit force fields from 3D Gaussian representations to generate interactive, physically realistic 4D videos from multi-view RGB inputs, achieving two orders of magnitude speedup over prior Gaussian simulators. Through explicit force field modeling, NGFF demonstrates superior spatial, temporal, and compositional generalization compared to SOTA methods, including Veo3 and NVIDIA Cosmos, while enabling robust sim-to-real transfer. Comprehensive evaluation on our GSCollision dataset---640k rendered physical videos (~4TB) spanning diverse materials and complex multi-object interactions---validates NGFF's effectiveness across challenging scenarios. Our results demonstrate that NGFF provides an effective bridge between visual perception and physical understanding, advancing video prediction toward physics-grounded world models with interactive capabilities.

Neural Force Field teaser

Neural Force Field: Few shot learning of generalized physical reasoning

Shiqian Li*, Ruihong Shen*, Yaoyu Tao, Chi Zhang, Yixin Zhu

The 14th International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2026)

We present NFF, a modeling framework built on NODE that learns interpretable force field representations which can be efficiently integrated through an ODE solver to predict object trajectories. Unlike existing approaches that rely on high-dimensional latent spaces, NFF captures fundamental physical concepts such as gravity, support, and collision in an interpretable manner. Experiments on two challenging physical reasoning tasks demonstrate that NFF, trained with only a few examples, achieves strong generalization to unseen scenarios. This physics-grounded representation enables efficient forward-backward planning and rapid adaptation through interactive refinement.

Services

Teaching Assistant
Data Structure and Algorithm (B) (offered for STEM students) 2025 Spring · Instructor: Prof. Bin Chen

Experience

Peking University (北京大学)

2023.09 - Present

Undergraduate Student

Major: Intelligence Science and Technology (Artificial Intelligence)

Double Major: Psychology

Selected Awards

2025

Junyuan Scholarship

2025

Merit Student of Peking University

2024

National Scholarship (Highest scholarship for Chinese undergraduates)

2024

Merit Student of Peking University

2023

Peking University Freshman Scholarship

Miscellaneous

Just a small section showing some photos taken recently. Hope you enjoy them :) 🥺🥺🥺