VLDB 2026 Research / reviewers in the wild / expert
Guandao Yang
dblp:209/9624
· DBLP profile ↗
25ranked-venue papers
5as first author
20since 2021 · last 2025
0000-0002-2992-5803ORCID · corroborated
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 23 · 5 first-author · 18 since 2021Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 18 · 2 first-author · 14 since 2021Human-computer interaction and ubiquitous computing · 2 · 2 since 2021
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | Accurate Differential Operators for Hybrid Neural FieldsabstractNeural fields have become widely used in various fields, from shape representation to neural rendering, and for solving partial differential equations (PDEs). With the advent of hybrid neural field representations like Instant NGP that leverage small MLPs and explicit representations, these models train quickly and can fit large scenes. Yet in many applications like rendering and simulation, hybrid neural fields can cause noticeable and unreasonable artifacts. This is because they do not yield accurate spatial derivatives needed for these downstream applications. In this work, we propose two ways to circumvent these challenges. Our first approach is a post hoc operator that uses local polynomial fitting to obtain more accurate derivatives from pre-trained hybrid neural fields. Additionally, we also propose a self-supervised fine-tuning approach that refines the hybrid neural field to yield accurate derivatives directly while preserving the initial signal. We show applications of our method to rendering, collision simulation, and solving PDEs. We observe that using our approach yields more accurate derivatives, reducing artifacts and leading to more accurate simulations in downstream applications. Aditya Chetan, Guandao Yang, Steve Marschner, Bharath Hariharan |
CVPR | 2 |
| 2025 | BlenderGym: Benchmarking Foundational Model Systems for Graphics Editingabstract3D graphics editing is crucial in applications like movie production and game design, yet it remains a time-consuming process that demands highly specialized domain expertise. Automating this process is challenging because graphical editing requires performing a variety of tasks, each requiring distinct skill sets. Recently, vision-language models (VLMs) have emerged as a powerful framework for automating the editing process, but their development and evaluation are bottlenecked by the lack of a comprehensive benchmark that requires human-level perception and presents real-world editing complexity. In this work, we present BlenderGym, the first comprehensive VLM system benchmark for 3D graphics editing. BlenderGym evaluates VLM systems through code-based 3D reconstruction tasks. We evaluate closed- and open-source VLM systems and observe that even the state-of-the-art VLM system struggles with tasks relatively easy for human Blender users. Enabled by BlenderGym, we study how inference scaling techniques impact VLM’s performance on graphics editing tasks. Notably, our findings reveal that the verifier used to guide the scaling of generation can itself be improved through inference scaling, complementing recent insights on inference scaling of LLM generation in coding and math tasks. We further show that inference compute is not uniformly effective and can be optimized by strategically distributing it between generation and verification. Yunqi Gu, Ian Huang, Jihyeon Je, Guandao Yang, Leonidas J. Guibas |
CVPR | 4 |
| 2025 | AIpparel: A Multimodal Foundation Model for Digital GarmentsabstractApparel is essential to human life, offering protection, mirroring cultural identities, and showcasing personal style. Yet, the creation of garments remains a time-consuming process, largely due to the manual work involved in designing them. To simplify this process, we introduce AIpparel, a multimodal foundation model for generating and editing sewing patterns. Our model fine-tunes state-of-the-art large multimodal models (LMMs) on a custom-curated large-scale dataset of over 120,000 unique garments, each with multimodal annotations including text, images, and sewing patterns. Additionally, we propose a novel tokenization scheme that concisely encodes these complex sewing patterns so that LLMs can learn to predict them efficiently. AIpparel achieves state-of-the-art performance in single-modal tasks, including text-to-garment and image-to-garment prediction, and enables novel multimodal garment generation applications such as interactive garment editing. The project website is at https: //georgenakayama.github.io/AIpparel/. Kiyohiro Nakayama, Jan Ackermann, Timur Levent Kesdogan, Maria Korosteleva, Olga Sorkine-Hornung, Leonidas J. Guibas, Guandao Yang, Gordon Wetzstein |
CVPR | 8 |
| 2025 | FlashDepth: Real-Time Streaming Video Depth Estimation at 2K ResolutionabstractA versatile video depth estimation model should (1) be accurate and consistent across frames, (2) produce high-resolution depth maps, and (3) support real-time streaming. We propose FlashDepth, a method that satisfies all three requirements, performing depth estimation on a 2044x1148 streaming video at 24 FPS. We show that, with careful modifications to pretrained single-image depth models, these capabilities are enabled with relatively little data and training. We evaluate our approach across multiple unseen datasets against state-of-the-art depth models, and find that ours outperforms them in terms of boundary sharpness and speed by a significant margin, while maintaining competitive accuracy. We hope our model will enable various applications that require high-resolution depth, such as video editing, and online decision-making, such as robotics. We release all code and model weights at https://github.com/Eyeline-Research/FlashDepth Gene Chou, Wenqi Xian, Guandao Yang, Mohamed Abdelfattah, Bharath Hariharan, Noah Snavely, Ning Yu 0006, Paul E. Debevec |
ICCV | 3 |
| 2025 | Self-Calibrating Gaussian Splatting for Large Field-of-View ReconstructionabstractIn this paper, we present a self-calibrating framework that jointly optimizes camera parameters, lens distortion and 3D Gaussian representations, enabling accurate and efficient scene reconstruction. In particular, our technique enables high-quality scene reconstruction from Large field-of-view (FOV) imagery taken with wide-angle lenses, allowing the scene to be modeled from a smaller number of images. Our approach introduces a novel method for modeling complex lens distortions using a hybrid network that combines invertible residual networks with explicit grids. This design effectively regularizes the optimization process, achieving greater accuracy than conventional camera models. Additionally, we propose a cubemap-based resampling strategy to support large FOV images without sacrificing resolution or introducing distortion artifacts. Our method is compatible with the fast rasterization of Gaussian Splatting, adaptable to a wide variety of camera lens distortion, and demonstrates state-of-the-art performance on both synthetic and real-world datasets. Youming Deng, Wenqi Xian, Guandao Yang, Leonidas J. Guibas, Gordon Wetzstein, Steve Marschner, Paul E. Debevec |
ICCV | 3 |
| 2025 | ImageGem: In-the-wild Generative Image Interaction Dataset for Generative Model PersonalizationabstractWe introduce ImageGem, a dataset for studying generative models that understand fine-grained individual preferences. We posit that a key challenge hindering the development of such a generative model is the lack of in-the-wild and fine-grained user preference annotations. Our dataset features real-world interaction data from 57K users, who collectively have built 242K customized LoRAs, written 3M text prompts, and created 5M generated images. With user preference annotations from our dataset, we were able to train better preference alignment models. In addition, leveraging individual user preference, we investigated the performance of retrieval models and a vision-language model on personalized image retrieval and generative model recommendation. Finally, we propose an end-to-end framework for editing customized diffusion models in a latent weight space to align with individual user preferences. Our results demonstrate that the ImageGem dataset enables, for the first time, a new paradigm for generative model personalization. Yuanhe Guo, Linxi Xie, Zhuoran Chen, Kangrui Yu, Ryan Po, Guandao Yang, Gordon Wetztein, Hongyi Wen |
ICCV | 6 |
| 2025 | InfoGS: Efficient Structure-Aware 3D Gaussians via Lightweight Information Shapingabstract3D Gaussians, as an explicit scene representation, typically involve thousands to millions of elements per scene. This makes it challenging to control the scene in ways that reflect the underlying semantics, where the number of independent entities is typically much smaller. Especially, if one wants to animate or edit objects in the scene, as this requires coordination among the many Gaussians involved in representing each object. To address this issue, we develop a mutual information shaping technique that enforces resonance and coordination between correlated Gaussians via a Gaussian attribute decoding network. Such correlations can be learned from putative 2D object masks in different views. By approximating the mutual information with the gradients concerning the network parameters, our method ensures consistency between scene elements and enables efficient scene editing by operating on network parameters rather than massive Gaussians. In particular, we develop an effective learning pipeline named ***InfoGS*** with lightweight optimization to shape the attribute decoding network ,while ensuring that the shaping (consistency) is maintained during continuous edits, avoiding re-shaping after parameter changes. Notably, our training only touches a small fraction of all Gaussians in the scene yet attains the desired correlated behavior according to the underlying scene structure. The proposed technique is evaluated on challenging scenes and demonstrates significant performance improvements in 3D object segmentation and promoting scene interactions, while inducing low computation and memory requirements. Our code is available at: https://github.com/StylesZhang/InfoGS. Yunchao Zhang, Guandao Yang, Leonidas J. Guibas, Yanchao Yang 0001 |
ICLR | 2 |
| 2024 | Orthogonal Adaptation for Modular Customization of Diffusion ModelsabstractCustomization techniques for text-to-image models have paved the way for a wide range of previously unattainable applications, enabling the generation of specific concepts across diverse contexts and styles. While existing methods facilitate high-fidelity customization for individual concepts or a limited, pre-defined set of them, they fall short of achieving scalability, where a single model can seamlessly render countless concepts. In this paper, we address a new problem called Modular Customization, with the goal of efficiently merging customized models that were fine-tuned independently for individual concepts. This allows the merged model to Jointly synthesize concepts in one image without compromising fidelity or incurring any additional computational costs. To address this problem, we introduce Orthogonal Adaptation, a method designed to encourage the customized models, which do not have access to each other during fine-tuning, to have orthogonal residual weights. This ensures that during inference time, the customized models can be summed with minimal interference. Our proposed method is both simple and versatile, applicable to nearly all optimizable weights in the model architecture. Through an extensive set of quantitative and qualitative evaluations, our method consistently outperforms relevant baselines in terms of efficiency and identity preservation, demonstrating a significant leap toward scalable customization of diffusion models. Ryan Po, Guandao Yang, Kfir Aberman, Gordon Wetzstein |
CVPR | 2 |
| 2024 | GPT-4V(ision) is a Human-Aligned Evaluator for Text-to-3D GenerationabstractDespite recent advances in text-to-3D generative methods, there is a notable absence of reliable evaluation metrics. Existing metrics usually focus on a single criterion each, such as how well the asset aligned with the input text. These metrics lack the flexibility to generalize to different evaluation criteria and might not align well with human preferences. Conducting user preference studies is an alternative that offers both adaptability and human-aligned results. User studies, however, can be very ex-pensive to scale. This paper presents an automatic, ver-satile, and human-aligned evaluation metric for text-to-3D generative models. To this end, we first develop a prompt generator using GPT-4V to generate evaluating prompts, which serve as input to compare text-to-3D models. We further design a method instructing GPT-4V to compare two 3D assets according to user-defined crite-ria. Finally, we use these pairwise comparison results to assign these models Elo ratings. Experimental results suggest our metric strongly aligns with human preference across different evaluation criteria. Our code is available at https://github.com/3DTopia/GPTEval3D. Guandao Yang, Zhibing Li, Kai Zhang 0045, Ziwei Liu 0002, Leonidas J. Guibas, Dahua Lin, Gordon Wetzstein |
CVPR | 2 |
| 2024 | BlenderAlchemy: Editing 3D Graphics with Vision-Language Models
Ian Huang, Guandao Yang, Leonidas J. Guibas |
ECCV (89) | 2 |
| 2024 | MegaScenes: Scene-Level View Synthesis at Scale
Joseph Tung, Gene Chou, Ruojin Cai, Guandao Yang, Kai Zhang 0045, Gordon Wetzstein, Bharath Hariharan, Noah Snavely |
ECCV (29) | 4 |
| 2024 | PhysAvatar: Learning the Physics of Dressed 3D Avatars from Visual Observations
Guandao Yang, Wang Yifan 0001, Donglai Xiang, Florian Dubost, Dmitry Lagun, Thabo Beeler, Federico Tombari, Leonidas J. Guibas, Gordon Wetzstein |
ECCV (37) | 3 |
| 2024 | DiffusionPDE: Generative PDE-Solving under Partial ObservationabstractWe introduce a general framework for solving partial differential equations (PDEs) using generative diffusion models. In particular, we focus on the scenarios where we do not have the full knowledge of the scene necessary to apply classical solvers. Most existing forward or inverse PDE approaches perform poorly when the observations on the data or the underlying coefficients are incomplete, which is a common assumption for real-world measurements. In this work, we propose DiffusionPDE that can simultaneously fill in the missing information and solve a PDE by modeling the joint distribution of the solution and coefficient spaces. We show that the learned generative priors lead to a versatile framework for accurately solving a wide range of PDEs under partial observation, significantly outperforming the state-of-the-art methods for both forward and inverse directions. Jiahe Huang, Guandao Yang, Jeong Joon Park |
NeurIPS | 2 |
| 2024 | FiVA: Fine-grained Visual Attribute Dataset for Text-to-Image Diffusion ModelsabstractRecent advances in text-to-image generation have enabled the creation of high-quality images with diverse applications. However, accurately describing desired visual attributes can be challenging, especially for non-experts in art and photography. An intuitive solution involves adopting favorable attributes from source images. Current methods attempt to distill identity and style from source images. However, "style" is a broad concept that includes texture, color, and artistic elements, but does not cover other important attributes like lighting and dynamics. Additionally, a simplified "style" adaptation prevents combining multiple attributes from different sources into one generated image. In this work, we formulate a more effective approach to decompose the aesthetics of a picture into specific visual attributes, letting users apply characteristics like lighting, texture, and dynamics from different images. To achieve this goal, we constructed the first fine-grained visual attributes dataset (FiVA) to the best of our knowledge. This FiVA dataset features a well-organized taxonomy for visual attributes and includes 1 M high-quality generated images with visual attribute annotations. Leveraging this dataset, we propose a fine-grained visual attributes adaptation framework (FiVA-Adapter) , which decouples and adapts visual attributes from one or more source images into a generated one. This approach enhances user-friendly customization, allowing users to selectively apply desired attributes to create images that meet their unique preferences and specific content requirements. Yinghao Xu 0001, Ryan Po, Mengchen Zhang 0001, Guandao Yang, Jiaqi Wang 0003, Ziwei Liu 0002, Dahua Lin, Gordon Wetzstein |
NeurIPS | 5 |
| 2024 | Robust Symmetry Detection via Riemannian Langevin DynamicsabstractSymmetries are ubiquitous across all kinds of objects, whether in nature or in man-made creations. While these symmetries may seem intuitive to the human eye, detecting them with a machine is nontrivial due to the vast search space. Classical geometry-based methods work by aggregating "votes" for each symmetry but struggle with noise. In contrast, learning-based methods may be more robust to noise, but often overlook partial symmetries due to the scarcity of annotated data. In this work, we address this challenge by proposing a novel symmetry detection method that marries classical symmetry detection techniques with recent advances in generative modeling. Specifically, we apply Langevin dynamics to a redefined symmetry space to enhance robustness against noise. We provide empirical results on a variety of shapes that suggest our method is not only robust to noise, but can also identify both partial and global symmetries. Moreover, we demonstrate the utility of our detected symmetries in various downstream tasks, such as compression and symmetrization of noisy shapes. Jihyeon Je, Guandao Yang, Boyang Deng, Shengqu Cai, Gordon Wetzstein, Or Litany, Leonidas J. Guibas |
SIGGRAPH Asia | 3 |
| 2023 | NeRF Revisited: Fixing Quadrature Instability in Volume RenderingabstractNeural radiance fields (NeRF) rely on volume rendering to synthesize novel views. Volume rendering requires evaluating an integral along each ray, which is numerically approximated with a finite sum that corresponds to the exact integral along the ray under piecewise constant volume density. As a consequence, the rendered result is unstable w.r.t. the choice of samples along the ray, a phenomenon that we dub quadrature instability. We propose a mathematically principled solution by reformulating the sample-based rendering equation so that it corresponds to the exact integral under piecewise linear volume density. This simultaneously resolves multiple issues: conflicts between samples along different rays, imprecise hierarchical sampling, and non-differentiability of quantiles of ray termination distances w.r.t. model parameters. We demonstrate several benefits over the classical sample-based rendering equation, such as sharper textures, better geometric reconstruction, and stronger depth supervision. Our proposed formulation can be also be used as a drop-in replacement to the volume rendering equation of existing NeRF-based methods. Our project page can be found at pl-nerf.github.io. Mikaela Angelina Uy, Kiyohiro Nakayama, Guandao Yang, Rahul Krishna Thomas, Leonidas J. Guibas, Ke Li 0011 |
NeurIPS | 3 |
| 2023 | Neural Caches for Monte Carlo Partial Differential Equation SolversabstractThis paper presents a method that uses neural networks as a caching mechanism to reduce the variance of Monte Carlo Partial Differential Equation solvers, such as the Walk-on-Spheres algorithm [Sawhney and Crane 2020]. While these Monte Carlo PDE solvers have the merits of being unbiased and discretization-free, their high variance often hinders real-time applications. On the other hand, neural networks can approximate the PDE solution, and evaluating these networks at inference time can be very fast. However, neural-network-based solutions may suffer from convergence difficulties and high bias. Our hybrid system aims to combine these two potentially complementary solutions by training a neural field to approximate the PDE solution using supervision from a WoS solver. This neural field is then used as a cache in the WoS solver to reduce variance during inference. We demonstrate that our neural field training procedure is better than the commonly used self-supervised objectives in the literature. We also show that our hybrid solver exhibits lower variance than WoS with the same computational budget: it is significantly better for small compute budgets and provides smaller improvements for larger budgets, reaching the same performance as WoS in the limit. Zilu Li, Guandao Yang, Christopher De Sa, Bharath Hariharan, Steve Marschner |
SIGGRAPH Asia | 2 |
| 2022 | Polynomial Neural Fields for Subband Decomposition and ManipulationabstractNeural fields have emerged as a new paradigm for representing signals, thanks to their ability to do it compactly while being easy to optimize. In most applications, however, neural fields are treated like a black box, which precludes many signal manipulation tasks. In this paper, we propose a new class of neural fields called basis-encoded polynomial neural fields (PNFs). The key advantage of a PNF is that it can represent a signal as a composition of a number of manipulable and interpretable components without losing the merits of neural fields representation. We develop a general theoretical framework to analyze and design PNFs. We use this framework to design Fourier PNFs, which match state-of-the-art performance in signal representation tasks that use neural fields. In addition, we empirically demonstrate that Fourier PNFs enable signal manipulation applications such as texture transfer and scale-space interpolation. Code is available at https://github.com/stevenygd/PNF. Guandao Yang, Sagie Benaim, Varun Jampani, Kyle Genova, Jonathan T. Barron, Thomas A. Funkhouser, Bharath Hariharan, Serge J. Belongie |
NeurIPS | 1 |
| 2021 | Stay Positive: Non-Negative Image Synthesis for Augmented RealityabstractIn applications such as optical see-through and projector augmented reality, producing images amounts to solving non-negative image generation, where one can only add light to an existing image. Most image generation methods, however, are ill-suited to this problem setting, as they make the assumption that one can assign arbitrary color to each pixel. In fact, naive application of existing methods fails even in simple domains such as MNIST digits, since one cannot create darker pixels by adding light. We know, however, that the human visual system can be fooled by optical illusions involving certain spatial configurations of brightness and contrast. Our key insight is that one can leverage this behavior to produce high quality images with negligible artifacts. For example, we can create the illusion of darker patches by brightening surrounding pixels. We propose a novel optimization procedure to produce images that satisfy both semantic and non-negativity constraints. Our approach can incorporate existing state-of-the-art methods, and exhibits strong performance in a variety of tasks including image-to-image translation and style transfer. Katie Luo, Guandao Yang, Wenqi Xian, Harald Haraldsson, Bharath Hariharan, Serge J. Belongie |
CVPR | 2 |
| 2021 | Geometry Processing with Neural FieldsabstractMost existing geometry processing algorithms use meshes as the default shape representation. Manipulating meshes, however, requires one to maintain high quality in the surface discretization. For example, changing the topology of a mesh usually requires additional procedures such as remeshing. This paper instead proposes the use of neural fields for geometry processing. Neural fields can compactly store complicated shapes without spatial discretization. Moreover, neural fields are infinitely differentiable, which allows them to be optimized for objectives that involve higher-order derivatives. This raises the question: can geometry processing be done entirely using neural fields? We introduce loss functions and architectures to show that some of the most challenging geometry processing tasks, such as deformation and filtering, can be done with neural fields. Experimental results show that our methods are on par with the well-established mesh-based methods without committing to a particular surface discretization. Code is available at https://github.com/stevenygd/NFGP. Guandao Yang, Serge J. Belongie, Bharath Hariharan, Vladlen Koltun |
NeurIPS | 1 |
| 2020 | Learning Gradient Fields for Shape Generation
Ruojin Cai, Guandao Yang, Hadar Averbuch-Elor, Zekun Hao, Serge J. Belongie, Noah Snavely, Bharath Hariharan |
ECCV (3) | 2 |
| 2019 | PointFlow: 3D Point Cloud Generation With Continuous Normalizing FlowsabstractAs 3D point clouds become the representation of choice for multiple vision and graphics applications, the ability to synthesize or reconstruct high-resolution, high-fidelity point clouds becomes crucial. Despite the recent success of deep learning models in discriminative tasks of point clouds, generating point clouds remains challenging. This paper proposes a principled probabilistic framework to generate 3D point clouds by modeling them as a distribution of distributions. Specifically, we learn a two-level hierarchy of distributions where the first level is the distribution of shapes and the second level is the distribution of points given a shape. This formulation allows us to both sample shapes and sample an arbitrary number of points from a shape. Our generative model, named PointFlow, learns each level of the distribution with a continuous normalizing flow. The invertibility of normalizing flows enables the computation of the likelihood during training and allows us to train our model in the variational inference framework. Empirically, we demonstrate that PointFlow achieves state-of-the-art performance in point cloud generation. We additionally show that our model can faithfully reconstruct point clouds and learn useful representations in an unsupervised manner. The code is available at https://github.com/stevenygd/PointFlow. Guandao Yang, Xun Huang 0002, Zekun Hao, Ming-Yu Liu 0001, Serge J. Belongie, Bharath Hariharan |
ICCV | 1 |
| 2019 | SWALP : Stochastic Weight Averaging in Low Precision TrainingabstractLow precision operations can provide scalability, memory savings, portability, and energy efficiency. This paper proposes SWALP, an approach to low precision training that averages low-precision SGD iterates with a modified learning rate schedule. SWALP is easy to implement and can match the performance of full-precision SGD even with all numbers quantized down to 8 bits, including the gradient accumulators. Additionally, we show that SWALP converges arbitrarily close to the optimal solution for quadratic objectives, and to a noise ball asymptotically smaller than low precision SGD in strongly convex settings. Guandao Yang, Polina Kirichenko, Junwen Bai, Andrew Gordon Wilson, Christopher De Sa |
ICML | 1 |
| 2018 | Learning to Evaluate Image CaptioningabstractEvaluation metrics for image captioning face two challenges. Firstly, commonly used metrics such as CIDEr, METEOR, ROUGE and BLEU often do not correlate well with human judgments. Secondly, each metric has well known blind spots to pathological caption constructions, and rule-based metrics lack provisions to repair such blind spots once identified. For example, the newly proposed SPICE correlates well with human judgments, but fails to capture the syntactic structure of a sentence. To address these two challenges, we propose a novel learning based discriminative evaluation metric that is directly trained to distinguish between human and machine-generated captions. In addition, we further propose a data augmentation scheme to explicitly incorporate pathological transformations as negative examples during training. The proposed metric is evaluated with three kinds of robustness tests and its correlation with human judgments. Extensive experiments show that the proposed data augmentation scheme not only makes our metric more robust toward several pathological transformations, but also improves its correlation with human judgments. Our metric outperforms other metrics on both caption level human correlation in Flickr 8k and system level human correlation in COCO. The proposed approach could be served as a learning based evaluation metric that is complementary to existing rule-based metrics. Yin Cui, Guandao Yang, Andreas Veit, Xun Huang 0002, Serge J. Belongie |
CVPR | 2 |
| 2018 | Learning Single-View 3D Reconstruction with Limited Pose Supervision
Guandao Yang, Yin Cui, Serge J. Belongie, Bharath Hariharan |
ECCV (15) | 1 |