Zian Wang

I am a senior research scientist and research manager at NVIDIA Spatial Intelligence Lab. I lead a research team working on generative world models and video foundation models that are high-quality, controllable, and efficient.

I defended my PhD at University of Toronto, advised by Sanja Fidler. My work on inverse rendering, scene representations, and generative rendering has received oral presentations and a best paper award. Before coming to Toronto, I did my bachelor at Tsinghua University.

Hiring: We have research scientist openings for candidates with strong experiences in large-scale video diffusion, VLMs, and multi-modality models.

We are proud to collaborate with world-class PhD students through research internships. Applications typically open in September.

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Research

PiD: Fast and High-Resolution Latent Decoding with Pixel Diffusion
Yifan Lu, Qi Wu, Jay Zhangjie Wu, Zian Wang, Huan Ling, Sanja Fidler, Xuanchi Ren
preprint, 2026
project page / pdf / code / model / bibtex     GitHub stars

🚀 PiD is officially integrated into ComfyUI (MR, model). Many thanks to the community for the support!

Gamma-World: Generative Multi-Agent World Modeling Beyond Two Players
Fangfu Liu*, Kai He*, Tianchang Shen, Tianshi Cao, Sanja Fidler, Yueqi Duan, Jun Gao, Igor Gilitschenski, Zian Wang, Xuanchi Ren
preprint, 2026
project page / pdf / code / bibtex     GitHub stars

🔥 Hugging Face #1 Paper of the day

NVIDIA OmniDreams: Real-Time Generative World Model for Closed-Loop Autonomous Vehicle Simulation
Aarti Basant, Amlan Kar, Despoina Paschalidou, Fangyin Wei, Francesco Ferroni, Guillermo Garcia Cobo, Haithem Turki, Huan Ling, Jaewoo Seo, Jialiang Wang, James Lucas, Jay Wu, Jonathan Lorraine, Jun Gao, Kai He, Katarina Tothova, Kevin Xie, Michal Tyszkiewicz, Qi Wu, Riccardo de Lutio, Ruilong Li, Sanja Fidler, Seung Wook Kim, Tianchang Shen, Tianshi Cao, Tobias Pfaff, William Lew, Xuanchi Ren, Yifan Lu, Zan Gojcic, Zian Wang
NVIDIA Technical Report, 2026
project page / pdf / code / model / data samples

DiffusionHarmonizer: Towards Temporal Reasoning for Image Editing and World Simulation
Yuxuan Zhang*, Katarina Tothova*, Zian Wang, Kangxue Yin, Haithem Turki, Riccardo de Lutio, Yen-Yu Chang, Or Litany, Sanja Fidler, Zan Gojcic
CVPR, 2026
project page / pdf / bibtex

ChronoEdit: Towards Temporal Reasoning for Image Editing and World Simulation
Jay Zhangjie Wu*, Xuanchi Ren*, Tianchang Shen, Tianshi Cao, Kai He, Yifan Lu, Ruiyuan Gao, Enze Xie, Shiyi Lan, Jose M. Alvarez, Jun Gao, Sanja Fidler, Zian Wang, Huan Ling*
ICLR, 2026
project page / pdf / code / bibtex     GitHub stars

LuxDiT: Lighting Estimation with Video Diffusion Transformer
Ruofan Liang, Kai He, Zan Gojcic, Igor Gilitschenski, Sanja Fidler, Nandita Vijaykumar, Zian Wang
NeurIPS, 2025
project page / pdf / code / bibtex     GitHub stars

UniRelight: Learning Joint Decomposition and Synthesis for Video Relighting
Kai He, Ruofan Liang, Jacob Munkberg, Jon Hasselgren, Nandita Vijaykumar, Alexander Keller, Sanja Fidler, Igor Gilitschenski, Zan Gojcic, Zian Wang
NeurIPS, 2025   (Spotlight Presentation)
project page / pdf / code / demo video / twitter thread / bibtex     GitHub stars

Controllable Weather Synthesis and Removal with Video Diffusion Models
Chih-Hao Lin, Zian Wang, Ruofan Liang, Yuxuan Zhang, Sanja Fidler, Shenlong Wang, Zan Gojcic
ICCV, 2025
project page / pdf / demo video / twitter thread / bibtex

VideoMat: Extracting PBR Materials from Video Diffusion Models
Jacob Munkberg, Zian Wang, Ruofan Liang, Tianchang Shen, Jon Hasselgren
EGSR, 2025
project page / pdf / video / bibtex

DiffusionRenderer: Neural Inverse and Forward Rendering with Video Diffusion Models
Ruofan Liang*, Zan Gojcic, Huan Ling, Jacob Munkberg, Jon Hasselgren, Chih-Hao Lin, Jun Gao, Alexander Keller, Nandita Vijaykumar, Sanja Fidler, Zian Wang*
CVPR, 2025   (Oral Presentation)
project page / pdf / supp video / demo / code / twitter thread / bibtex     GitHub stars

🚀 [Open Source Model] Cosmos-Transfer1-DiffusionRenderer is a major upgrade with significantly improved quality—powered by NVIDIA Cosmos and enhanced data curation.
Try the Cosmos version: demo / code / model / blog     GitHub stars

Photorealistic Object Insertion with Diffusion-Guided Inverse Rendering
Ruofan Liang, Zan Gojcic, Merlin Nimier-David, David Acuna, Nandita Vijaykumar, Sanja Fidler, Zian Wang
ECCV, 2024
project page / pdf / bibtex

Adaptive Shells for Efficient Neural Radiance Field Rendering
Zian Wang*, Tianchang Shen*, Merlin Nimier-David*, Nicholas Sharp, Jun Gao, Alexander Keller, Sanja Fidler, Thomas Müller, Zan Gojcic
ACM Transactions on Graphics (SIGGRAPH Asia), 2023   (Best Paper Award)
project page / arxiv / pdf / supp / twitter thread / bibtex

Neural LiDAR Fields for Novel View Synthesis
Shengyu Huang, Zan Gojcic, Zian Wang, Francis Williams, Yoni Kasten, Sanja Fidler, Konrad Schindler, Or Litany
ICCV, 2023
project page / pdf / bibtex / tech blog

Flexible Isosurface Extraction for Gradient-Based Mesh Optimization
Tianchang Shen, Jacob Munkberg, Jon Hasselgren, Kangxue Yin, Zian Wang, Wenzheng Chen, Zan Gojcic, Sanja Fidler, Nicholas Sharp, Jun Gao
ACM Transactions on Graphics (SIGGRAPH), 2023
project page / pdf / supp / code / bibtex     GitHub stars

Neural Fields meet Explicit Geometric Representations for Inverse Rendering of Urban Scenes
Zian Wang, Tianchang Shen, Jun Gao, Shengyu Huang, Jacob Munkberg, Jon Hasselgren, Zan Gojcic, Wenzheng Chen, Sanja Fidler
CVPR, 2023
project page / pdf / video / bibtex

🚢 Combined with other NVIDIA technology, FEGR is one component of Neural Reconstruction Engine announced in GTC Sept 2022 Keynote.

GET3D: A Generative Model of High Quality 3D Textured Shapes Learned from Images
Jun Gao, Tianchang Shen, Zian Wang, Wenzheng Chen, Kangxue Yin, Daiqing Li, Or Litany, Zan Gojcic, Sanja Fidler
NeurIPS, 2022   (Spotlight Presentation)
project page / pdf / code / bibtex / two-minute papers     GitHub stars

Neural Light Field Estimation for Street Scenes with Differentiable Virtual Object Insertion
Zian Wang, Wenzheng Chen, David Acuna, Jan Kautz, Sanja Fidler
ECCV, 2022
project page / pdf / video / bibtex
DIB-R++: Learning to Predict Lighting and Material with a Hybrid Differentiable Renderer
Wenzheng Chen, Joey Litalien, Jun Gao, Zian Wang, Clement Fuji Tsang, Sameh Khamis, Or Litany, Sanja Fidler
NeurIPS, 2021
project page / pdf / bibtex
Learning Indoor Inverse Rendering with 3D Spatially-Varying Lighting
Zian Wang, Jonah Philion, Sanja Fidler, Jan Kautz
ICCV, 2021   (Oral Presentation)
project page / pdf / video / bibtex
Beyond Fixed Grid: Learning Geometric Image Representation with a Deformable Grid
Jun Gao, Zian Wang, Jinchen Xuan, Sanja Fidler
ECCV, 2020
project page / pdf / presentation video (short, long) / bibtex
Object Instance Annotation with Deep Extreme Level Set Evolution
Zian Wang, David Acuna*, Huan Ling*, Amlan Kar, Sanja Fidler
CVPR, 2019
project page / pdf / code / poster / bibtex

Visit this page for code access. For research purpose signed up with an academic email, the code is automatically sent within minutes. Feel free to reach out if any issue occurs.

Learning Semantics-Preserving Attention and Contextual Interaction for Group Activity Recognition
Yansong Tang, Jiwen Lu, Zian Wang, Ming Yang, Jie Zhou
IEEE Transaction on Image Processing (TIP), 2019
pdf / supp

Mining Semantics-Preserving Attention for Group Activity Recognition
Yansong Tang, Zian Wang, Peiyang Li, Jiwen Lu, Ming Yang, Jie Zhou
ACM Multimedia, 2018   (Oral Presentation)
pdf / slides

Multi-stream Deep Neural Networks for RGB-D Egocentric Action Recognition
Yansong Tang, Zian Wang, Jiwen Lu, Jianjiang Feng, Jie Zhou
IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology (TCSVT), 2018
pdf / supp / dataset



Academic Services
Conference Reviewer: ICCV, CVPR, ECCV, NeurIPS, SIGGRAPH

Journal Reviewer: T-PAMI, TVCG

Teaching Assistant, CSC 420: Introduction to Image Understanding 19 Fall, 20 Summer, 20 Fall

Teaching Assistant, CSC 320: Introduction to Visual Computing 19-20 Winter


Honors and Awards
Outstanding Reviewer Award, ECCV 2024

Best Paper Award, SIGGRAPH Asia 2023

SenseTime Undergraduate Scholarship, 2018

National Scholarship, 2017


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