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

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Recent Publications
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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Yehang Zhang, Haojian Huang, Yifan Chang, Jianchong Su, Bohan Zhou, Yingjie Xu, Wosong Chen, Tianhao Zhou, Chenxu Wang, Tianyi Zhang, Yangkai Wei, Wenqian Li, Shiyuan Deng, Yinchuan Li, Ying-Cong Chen, Zexi Li. World Action Agent: Harnessing VLMs for Robot Manipulation via World Action Rehearsal. arXiv preprint arXiv:2609.29964, 2026.
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Harold Haodong Chen, Rongjin Guo, Disen Lan, Wen-Jie Shu, Hongfei Zhang, Hanzhe Hu, Shengtao Yao, Zixin Zhang, Guibin Zhang, Zhefan Rao, Jinxiu Liu, Yexin Liu, Rui Peng, Yuhao Liu, Bin Ren, Shuai Yang, Yukang Chen, Salman Khan, Ying-Cong Chen, Ser-Nam Lim, Rynson W. H. Lau, Nicu Sebe, Yu Cheng, Ming-Hsuan Yang, Qifeng Chen. The Past Frames the Future: Memory for Autoregressive Video Generation. arXiv preprint arXiv:2609.28466, 2026.
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Wenhow Li, Chengwei MA, Hui Xiong, Ying-Cong Chen, Lei Zhang. Platonic Representation Hypothesis on World Models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2608.23720, 2026.
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Zhifei Chen, Luozhou Wang, Guibao Shen, Dongyu Yan, Shuai Yang, Tianshuo Xu, Yihua Du, Wei Wang, Tianyi Gui, Lianghua Huang, Ying-Cong Chen. ReWorld: An Interactive World Model with Long-Horizon Memory. arXiv preprint arXiv:2608.23565, 2026.
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