Bio
I am an assistant professor in the School of Data Science at CUHK-Shenzhen. I did my PhD in computer science at Mila and Université de Montréal with Liam Paull and Yoshua Bengio. During my PhD study, I visited at Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, and worked with Michael J. Black and Bernhard Schölkopf. I received my M.S. and B.S. degrees in computer science with a minor in economics from Georgia Tech.
Students interested in Fall '26 admission are welcome to contact me (and potentially collaborate as an RA) in advance. We also welcome visiting students and RAs with strong background in either 3D generation or foundation models.
To apply for positions:
- If you are affiliated with CUHK-Shenzhen. Shoot me an email with your resume and experiences.
- If you are outside CUHK-Shenzhen. Please fill out the Google Form and then drop me an email if interested.
Due to the large volume of emails, I apologize that I am not able to reply to every email.
Research
I study representations and learning methods to develop models with a spatial, physical, and semantic understanding for re-creating and simulating our world. I draw on principles and theories from machine learning and related fields to discover simple and effective approaches that generalize well across diverse domains.
More specifically, my current focuses are:
- Foundation model adaptation and post-training. How foundation models efficiently and effectively learn from and adapt to our world (with and without training), as in OFT, VGG-Flow, Nabla-GFlowNet.
- Reasoning for spatial and physical intelligence. How LLMs/VLMs understand, create and animate complex 3D entities and structures, as in BesiegeField, SGP-Bench, ChatGarment.
What's more? I am also actively exploring the following topics:
- Agentic reasoning
- Continual learning and memory
- Generative models and their applications
- 3D generation and world models for embodied AI / games
Students
PhD Students
- Wenqian Zhang
- Shuyuan Zhang
- Ruixiang Wang (w/ Kui Jia)
MPhil Students
- Qingming Liu (w/ Kui Jia)
Visiting Students / RAs
- Zhou Jiang (undergrad student @ SCUT, w/ Yandong Wen)
- Bao Li (master student @ Chinese Academy of Sciences, w/ Yuliang Xiu)
- Yuping Zheng (undergrad student @ CUHK-Shenzhen)