About Me

I am an Assistant Professor at AI Thrust, Information Hub of Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou). I am also an Affiliated Assistant Professor of the department of Computer Science & Engineering (Clear Water Bay Campus). I am a faculty member of the Deep Vision Lab. Previously, I was a Postdoctoral Associate at Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Lab of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where I had the privilege of working with Prof. Dina Katabi. I earned my Ph.D. degree from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, under the mentorship of Prof. Jiaya Jia. I am honored as Distinguished Young Scholars (Overseas). For more information about my research group, please visit EnVision-Research.

I work very closely with Knowin AI through a long-term research partnership on real-world AI systems and embodied intelligence. Beyond research projects, this collaboration plays an important role in student training, including co-mentoring PhD students, supporting research internships, and building bridges between academic research and real-world deployment.

Interests
  • Computer Vision
  • Generative Models
  • AI+X
Prospective Students

My current research is increasingly focused on AI systems grounded in real-world deployment, real data, and long-term data flywheels. I am especially interested in problems that cannot be solved by simply following existing papers, benchmarks, or publication-driven templates.

I am looking for students who are willing to work on uncertain, long-horizon problems, care about real-world impact and durable technical value, and can stay focused without being driven solely by short-term metrics such as paper counts, internships, or resume building.

If you are primarily looking for a conventional publication-driven PhD path, frequent industry internships, or short-term career optimization, my group may not be the best fit. If you resonate with this direction, please read my full advising statement before reaching out.

Read the full advising statement

Recent News
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Recent Publications
Zhifei Chen, Tianshuo Xu, Leyi Wu, Luozhou Wang, Dongyu Yan, Zihan You, Wenting Luo, Guo Zhang, Ying-Cong Chen. STANCE: Controllable Video Generation for Structured Dynamics via Sparse-To-Dense ANChored Encoding. Computer Vision – ECCV 2026, 2026.
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Haojian Huang, Pukun Zhao, Zexi Li, Yehang Zhang, Yangkai Wei, Wenqian Li, Han Yang, Kaiwen Zhou, Ying-Cong Chen, Yinchuan Li. Are Frontier VLM Agents Ready to Be Robot Generalists? An Empirical Study with the Embodied Agent Arena. arXiv preprint arXiv:2610.00854, 2026.
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Jiantao Lin, Meixi Chen, Yingjie Xu, Chenbo Fu, Leyi Wu, Hao Chen, Yinchuan Li, Ying-Cong Chen. Seg3DParts: Segmentation-Grounded Controllable Part-Level 3D Generation. NeurIPS 2026 (accepted), 2026.
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Jiantao Lin, Yingjie Xu, Mingzhi Sheng, Yangkai Wei, Hao Chen, Ying-Cong Chen. DirectUV: Image-Conditioned UV Texture Generation with Surface-Aware Positional Encoding. NeurIPS 2026 (accepted), 2026.
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Haojian Huang, Zexi Li, Junhao Guo, Yehang Zhang, Wenxuan Peng, Bohan Zhou, Weilin Ruan, Leyi Wu, Chenxu Wang, Jianchong Su, Binghui Xie, Wosong Chen, Yingjie Xu, Tianhao Zhou, Suzeyu Chen, Pukun Zhao, Jiaqi He, Xinyi Li, Runze Li, Peiran Dong, Shaoxiang Dang, Jing Huang, Yingbing Chen, Yifan Chang, Tianyi Zhang, Shiyuan Deng, Haozhi Wang, Yangkai Wei, Wenqian Li, Han Yang, Kaiwen Zhou, Huaping Liu, James Cheng, Rui Shao, Donglin Wang, Yaochu Jin, Jianye Hao, Ying-Cong Chen, Yinchuan Li. In-Context Learning for Robots: Methods and Applications. arXiv preprint arXiv:2609.36012, 2026.
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