VLDB 2026 Research / reviewers in the wild / expert
Haotian Zhang 0004
dblp:83/4184-4
· DBLP profile ↗
8ranked-venue papers
2as first author
8since 2021 · last 2026
0009-0008-0293-337XORCID · conflict
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 7 · 2 first-author · 7 since 2021Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 4 · 4 since 2021Databases, data management, data science and information retrieval · 1 · 1 since 2021
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | Autoregressive Diffusion with Hybrid Representation for Interactive Human Motion GenerationabstractGenerating realistic 3D human motions in real-time within interactive applications is key for animation, simulation, and humanoid robotics. While recent offline motion generation approaches offer precise control via text and kinematic constraints, they lack the inference speed required for interactive settings. Conversely, existing online methods enable real-time synthesis but often sacrifice controllability or struggle with complex text semantics and long-horizon goals due to limited context windows. In this work, we introduce ARDY, a streaming generation framework that bridges this gap by enabling high-fidelity motion generation controllable via online text prompts and flexible kinematic constraints. ARDY employs a hybrid representation that combines explicit root features with a latent body embedding, balancing precise trajectory control with efficient generative learning. We propose a two-stage autoregressive transformer denoiser that features variable history context and supports conditioning on flexible, long-horizon kinematic constraints. By training on a large-scale motion capture dataset and being directly conditioned on text labels and kinematic constraints sampled from ground truth poses, ARDY natively learns controllable generation that supports online prompting and flexible long-horizon goals. Extensive evaluations on the HumanML3D benchmark and the large-scale, high-fidelity Bones Rigplay dataset demonstrate ARDY's high motion quality and constraint adherence, validating the efficacy of our key architectural decisions. Finally, we demonstrate the method's practical versatility through an interactive demo featuring dynamic text control, diverse keyframe pose constraints, path following, and interactive locomotion control via mouse and keyboard. Supplementary video results, code, and model releases can be found at https://research.nvidia.com/labs/sil/projects/ardy/. Kaifeng Zhao 0004, Mathis Petrovich, Haotian Zhang 0004, Tingwu Wang, Siyu Tang 0001, Davis Rempe |
ACM Trans. Graph. | 3 |
| 2025 | GENMO: A GENeralist Model for Human MOtionabstractHuman motion modeling traditionally separates motion generation and estimation into distinct tasks with specialized models. Motion generation models focus on creating diverse, realistic motions from inputs like text, audio, or keyframes, while motion estimation models aim to reconstruct accurate motion trajectories from observations like videos. Despite sharing underlying representations of temporal dynamics and kinematics, this separation limits knowledge transfer between tasks and requires maintaining separate models. We present GENMO, a unified Generalist Model for Human Motion that bridges motion estimation and generation in a single framework. Our key insight is to reformulate motion estimation as constrained motion generation, where the output motion must precisely satisfy observed conditioning signals. Leveraging the synergy between regression and diffusion, GENMO achieves accurate global motion estimation while enabling diverse motion generation. We also introduce an estimation-guided training objective that exploits in-the-wild videos with 2D annotations and text descriptions to enhance generative diversity. Furthermore, our novel architecture handles variable-length motions and mixed multimodal conditions (text, audio, video) at different time intervals, offering flexible control. This unified approach creates synergistic benefits: generative priors improve estimated motions under challenging conditions like occlusions, while diverse video data enhances generation capabilities. Extensive experiments demonstrate GENMO's effectiveness as a generalist framework that successfully handles multiple human motion tasks within a single model. Jinkun Cao, Haotian Zhang 0004, Davis Rempe, Jan Kautz, Umar Iqbal 0001, Ye Yuan 0007 |
ICCV | 3 |
| 2025 | Generative Motion Infilling from Imprecisely Timed KeyframesabstractAbstract Keyframes are a standard representation for kinematic motion specification. Recent learned motion‐inbetweening methods use keyframes as a way to control generative motion models, and are trained to generate life‐like motion that matches the exact poses and timings of input keyframes. However, the quality of generated motion may degrade if the timing of these constraints is not perfectly consistent with the desired motion. Unfortunately, correctly specifying keyframe timings is a tedious and challenging task in practice. Our goal is to create a system that synthesizes high‐quality motion from keyframes, even if keyframes are imprecisely timed. We present a method that allows constraints to be retimed as part of the generation process. Specifically, we introduce a novel model architecture that explicitly outputs a time‐warping function to correct mistimed keyframes and spatial residuals that add pose details. We demonstrate how our method can automatically turn approximately timed keyframe constraints into diverse, realistic motions with plausible timing and detailed submovements. Purvi Goel, Haotian Zhang 0004, C. Karen Liu, Kayvon Fatahalian |
Comput. Graph. Forum | 2 |
| 2024 | COIN: Control-Inpainting Diffusion Prior for Human and Camera Motion Estimation
Ye Yuan 0007, Davis Rempe, Haotian Zhang 0004, Pavlo Molchanov 0001, Cewu Lu, Jan Kautz, Umar Iqbal 0001 |
ECCV (16) | 4 |
| 2023 | Learning Physically Simulated Tennis Skills from Broadcast VideosabstractWe present a system that learns diverse, physically simulated tennis skills from large-scale demonstrations of tennis play harvested from broadcast videos. Our approach is built upon hierarchical models, combining a low-level imitation policy and a high-level motion planning policy to steer the character in a motion embedding learned from broadcast videos. When deployed at scale on large video collections that encompass a vast set of examples of real-world tennis play, our approach can learn complex tennis shotmaking skills and realistically chain together multiple shots into extended rallies, using only simple rewards and without explicit annotations of stroke types. To address the low quality of motions extracted from broadcast videos, we correct estimated motion with physics-based imitation, and use a hybrid control policy that overrides erroneous aspects of the learned motion embedding with corrections predicted by the high-level policy. We demonstrate that our system produces controllers for physically-simulated tennis players that can hit the incoming ball to target positions accurately using a diverse array of strokes (serves, forehands, and backhands), spins (topspins and slices), and playing styles (one/two-handed backhands, left/right-handed play). Overall, our system can synthesize two physically simulated characters playing extended tennis rallies with simulated racket and ball dynamics. Code and data for this work is available at https://research.nvidia.com/labs/toronto-ai/vid2player3d/. Haotian Zhang 0004, Ye Yuan 0007, Viktor Makoviychuk, Yunrong Guo, Sanja Fidler, Xue Bin Peng, Kayvon Fatahalian |
ACM Trans. Graph. | 1 |
| 2022 | Spotting Temporally Precise, Fine-Grained Events in Video
Haotian Zhang 0004, Michaël Gharbi, Matthew Fisher, Kayvon Fatahalian |
ECCV (35) | 2 |
| 2021 | Analysis of Faces in a Decade of US Cable TV NewsabstractCable (TV) news reaches millions of US households each day. News stakeholders such as communications researchers, journalists, and media monitoring organizations are interested in the visual content of cable news, especially who is on-screen. Manual analysis, however, is labor intensive and limits the size of prior studies. We conduct a large-scale, quantitative analysis of the faces in a decade of cable news video from the top three US cable news networks (CNN, FOX, and MSNBC), totaling 244,038 hours between January 2010 and July 2019. Our work uses technologies such as automatic face and gender recognition to measure the "screen time" of faces and to enable visual analysis and exploration at scale. Our analysis method gives insight into a broad set of socially relevant topics. For instance, male-presenting faces receive much more screen time than female-presenting faces (2.4x in 2010, 1.9x in 2019). To make our dataset and annotations accessible, we release a public interface at https://tvnews.stanford.edu that allows the general public to write queries and to perform their own analyses. Will Crichton, Haotian Zhang 0004, Daniel Y. Fu, Jacob Ritchie, Jeremy Barenholtz, Ben Hannel, Xinwei Yao 0002, Michaela Murray, Geraldine Moriba, Maneesh Agrawala, Kayvon Fatahalian |
KDD | 3 |
| 2021 | Vid2Player: Controllable Video Sprites That Behave and Appear Like Professional Tennis PlayersabstractWe present a system that converts annotated broadcast video of tennis matches into interactively controllable video sprites that behave and appear like professional tennis players. Our approach is based on controllable video textures and utilizes domain knowledge of the cyclic structure of tennis rallies to place clip transitions and accept control inputs at key decision-making moments of point play. Most importantly, we use points from the video collection to model a player’s court positioning and shot selection decisions during points. We use these behavioral models to select video clips that reflect actions the real-life player is likely to take in a given match-play situation, yielding sprites that behave realistically at the macro level of full points, not just individual tennis motions. Our system can generate novel points between professional tennis players that resemble Wimbledon broadcasts, enabling new experiences, such as the creation of matchups between players that have not competed in real life or interactive control of players in the Wimbledon final. According to expert tennis players, the rallies generated using our approach are significantly more realistic in terms of player behavior than video sprite methods that only consider the quality of motion transitions during video synthesis. The supplementary material/video are available at our https://cs.stanford.edu/~haotianz/research/vid2player/ project website. Haotian Zhang 0004, Cristobal Sciutto, Maneesh Agrawala, Kayvon Fatahalian |
ACM Trans. Graph. | 1 |