Physical World Understanding and Generation
World models and generative models of spatial dynamics, part structure, and 3D geometry for physical AI.
About
I am an Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), where I lead the Perception and LANguage (PLAN) Lab. My research spans computer vision, artificial intelligence (AI), and robot learning, specifically embodied AI, physical AI, and generative AI. We develop robot learning methods, world models, and 2D/3D generative models that enable intelligent systems to perceive, reason, anticipate, and act in the physical world.
Core research directions
Unified Generative Models
Generative AI that couples reasoning, generation, and editing for efficient, controllable image, video, and 3D synthesis.
Self-Improving Embodied Intelligence
Robot learning and embodied AI systems that use failures and learning progress to improve policies and training environments.
I am based in the School of Information Sciences, with affiliate appointments in the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. I am also an affiliated faculty member of the Center for Autonomy and IMMERSE. Before joining Illinois, I was a faculty member at Virginia Tech and a research scientist at IBM Research. I received my PhD in Computer Science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2019.
We recruit PhD students through iSchool, CS, and ECE. Please see the information for prospective students before reaching out.
Selected Publications
CVPR 2026
PALM: Progress-Aware Policy Learning via Affordance Reasoning for Long-Horizon Robotic Manipulation
Yuanzhe Liu, Jingyuan Zhu, Yuchen Mo, Gen Li, Xu Cao, Jin Jin, Yifan Shen, Zhengyuan Li, Tianjiao Yu, Wenzhen Yuan, Fangqiang Ding, Ismini Lourentzou
CVPR 2026
Part²GS: Part-aware Modeling of Articulated Objects using 3D Gaussian Splatting
Tianjiao Yu, Vedant Shah, Muntasir Wahed, Ying Shen, Kiet A. Nguyen, Ismini Lourentzou
CVPR 2026
Phantom: Physics-Infused Video Generation via Joint Modeling of Visual and Latent Dynamics
Ying Shen, Jerry Xiong, Tianjiao Yu, Ismini Lourentzou
ECCV 2026
DreamPartGen: Semantically Grounded Part-Level 3D Generation via Collaborative LLM Agents
Tianjiao Yu, Xinzhuo Li, Muntasir Wahed, Jerry Xiong, Yifan Shen, Ying Shen, Ismini Lourentzou
News
Sep 2026
5 papers accepted to NeurIPS 2026. Congratulations to all co-authors!
Jun 2026
3 papers accepted to ECCV 2026. Congratulations to all co-authors!
May 2026
NSF CAREER RI Award: Shaping Embodied Intelligence Through Language-Guided Introspection.
May 2026
Serving as Next Generation and Accessibility Chair for NeurIPS 2026.
May 2026
Recognized as an ICML 2026 Gold Reviewer (top 25%).
May 2026
2 PLAN Lab papers accepted to ICML 2026.
Apr 2026
Honored to be included in the Fall 2025 Facilitating Learning Excellence Award list at UIUC.
Feb 2026
7 PLAN Lab papers accepted to CVPR 2026.
Jan 2026
Serving as Expo Co-Chair for ICML 2026.
Sep 2025
Serving as Area Chair for CVPR 2026, AISTATS 2026, ECCV 2026, and ACL 2026.
Sep 2025
Serving as JCDL 2025 Resources Track Co-Chair.
Aug 2025
Thank you to Google for the generous research gift supporting our work!
Aug 2025
Honored to be included in the list of Outstanding 2025 Summer NCSA SPIN Mentors.
Jul 2025
Purpcorn-PLAN is the Defending Team Winner of the Amazon Nova AI Challenge!
May 2025
Honored to be included in the Spring 2025 List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent by Their Students.
Mar 2025
The Purpcorn-PLAN team is competing in the Amazon Nova AI Challenge.
Feb 2025
PLAN Lab is funded by DoD, DOE, and DARPA.
Feb 2025
Gaze Meets Computer Vision Workshop at WACV 2025.
Feb 2024
Serving as Area Chair for ECCV 2024 and MICCAI 2024, and as Associate PC Co-Chair for ACM PETRA 2024.
Jan 2024
Joined the iSchool at Illinois.
Dec 2023
Recognized as Best Vice Co-Chair at IEEE BigData 2023.
May 2023
Received a Virginia Tech College of Engineering 2023 Dean's Award as Outstanding New Assistant Professor.
Mar 2023
Joined the NeurIPS 2023 Organizing Committee as Workshop Co-Chair.
Teaching
Spring 2026
IS 567
Text Mining
Illinois
Fall 2024 · Fall 2025
IS 327
Concepts of Machine Learning
Illinois
Spring 2025
IS 557
Machine Learning Team Projects
Illinois
Fall 2023
CS 6604
Embodied Artificial Intelligence
Virginia Tech
Fall 2022 · Spring 2023
CS 5824
Advanced Machine Learning
Virginia Tech
Fall 2021
CS 5604
Information Retrieval
Virginia Tech
Spring 2021
CS 6604
Data Challenges in Machine Learning
Virginia Tech
Teaching recognition
2025
Facilitating Learning Excellence Award, Fall 2025
2025
List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent by Their Students, Spring 2025
Selected Recognition
2026
NSF CAREER Award
Shaping Embodied Intelligence Through Language-Guided Introspection
2026
ICML Gold Reviewer
Top 25% of reviewers
2025
Outstanding NCSA SPIN Mentor
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
2023
Outstanding New Assistant Professor
Virginia Tech College of Engineering
2022
Outstanding Reviewer
NeurIPS Datasets and Benchmarks
2020
Outstanding Reviewer
EMNLP
2019
Rising Stars in EECS
2019
IBM Invention Plateau Award
Selected Keynotes, Talks, and Panels
October 2026
Generative Models for Interactive Worlds
IMMERSE Seminar
October 2026
Reasoning for Multimodal Understanding and Generation
Capital One Research Spotlight
September 2026
Generative Models for Physical Interaction
AICE 2026 Fall Symposium
September 2026
VTAM: Video-Tactile-Action Models for Complex Physical Interaction Beyond VLAs
WM@Booth 2026
June 2026
Unified Multimodal Reasoning & Generation with Discrete Flow Matching
Google AI Systems DevLabs, Sunnyvale
June 2026
PHANTOM: Physics-Infused Video Generation via Joint Modeling of Visual and Latent Physical Dynamics
Voxel51 Best of CVPR 2026
June 2026
From VLAs to World-Action Models: What Robots Gain from Touch and Physical Reasoning
URVIS Workshop, CVPR 2026
June 2026
Long-Form Video Generation Needs World Models
AI-assisted Long Video Creation Workshop, CVPR 2026
June 2026
From Better Pixels to Better Grounding
NTIRE Workshop, CVPR 2026
June 2026
Generative Foundations for Embodied AI
CVPR 2026 Area Chair Workshop
June 2026
Panel Discussion
Sense of Space Workshop, CVPR 2026
March 2026
Roundtable Moderator: Deep Dive — AI in Critical Care Medicine
Society of Critical Care Medicine Congress
September 2025
PLAN Lab Research
SWARM Engineering
June 2025
PLAN Lab Research
U.S. Army Geospatial Research Laboratory
April 2025
Generative AI Trends from a Broad Multimodal ML View
Virginia Tech Generative AI Applications in Social Science
April 2024
Uni/Cross-modal Understanding with Limited Supervision
UIUC Interactive Computing Seminar
June 2024
Towards Robust Multimodal AI
Siebel School / Illinois Computer Science Colloquium
May 2024
Commonsense for Video Localization
Midwest Machine Learning Symposium
November 2023
AI Personal Assistants
Curious Conversations podcast
March 2023
Robust Visual Understanding with Limited Supervision
UMass CIIR Seminar
August 2022
Chest ImaGenome and AI for Clinical Reasoning
AI-ready Healthcare podcast
July 2022
Keynote: Supervision Signals for Machine Learning in Healthcare and Beyond
ACM PETRA
Academic Service
Conference Organization
Workshops & community building
2026
From Frames to Stories: Reliable, Controllable, and Trustworthy Long-Horizon Video Generation
2025
Symposium on Information Retrieval and Language Models
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
2024
Manufacturing AI Quality, Statistics, and Reliability Challenge
INFORMS Annual Meeting
Other professional roles
2021–2024
ACM PETRA
Associate Co-Chair (2021, 2023, 2024) · Ph.D. Consortium Chair (2022)
2021–2026
Area Chair / Senior Program Committee
CVPR 2027 · AISTATS 2027 (Senior AC) · AAAI 2027 (SPC) · WACV 2027 · CVPR 2026 · ECCV 2026 · ACL 2026 · AISTATS 2026 · ECCV 2024 · MICCAI 2024 · CIKM 2024 · ACL 2023· MICCAI 2023