About Me

I am a Ph.D. student in the UCLA Mobility Lab at the University of California, Los Angeles, advised by Prof. Jiaqi Ma.

Previously, I received my M.S. in Computer Science from UMass Amherst and worked closely with Prof. Ming-Hsuan Yang at UC Merced. I received my B.S. in Artificial Intelligence from the Chu Kochen Honors College and Turing Class at Zhejiang University, advised by Prof. Zhou Zhao.

Research

My research focuses on spatial intelligence for embodied AI. I study how agents understand and act in 3D environments from incomplete observations, and how we can efficiently construct and edit the worlds they inhabit. My work follows two connected directions:

  1. Spatial Intelligence & Embodied Agents — reasoning with imagination, memory, active perception, and feedback.
  2. 3D World Generation & Editing — building rich, controllable, and spatially consistent scenes.

Selected and related publications below. * denotes equal contribution unless otherwise noted in the paper.

Spatial Intelligence & Embodied Agents

From imagining unseen views and maintaining spatial memory to actively gathering evidence and recovering from execution errors.

3D World Generation & Editing

Generating and editing coherent 3D scenes, and extending scene construction to interactive worlds with humans and robots.

Virtual Community — official demo

Virtual Community: An Open World for Humans, Robots, and Society

Qinhong Zhou*, Hongxin Zhang, Xiangye Lin, Zheyuan Zhang, Yutian Chen, Wenjun Liu, Zunzhe Zhang, Sunli Chen, Lixing Fang, Qiushi Lyu, Xinyu Sun, Jincheng Yang, Zeyuan Wang, Bao Chi Dang, Zhehuan Chen, Daksha Ladia, Quang Vinh Dang, Jiageng Liu, Chuang Gan

ICLR 2026

Scaling scene construction to open worlds with humans, robots, and socially grounded agent communities.

Paper Project
Other Publications Multimodal learning, physical commonsense, and generative applications · 3 papers

News

  • One paper was accepted to NeurIPS 2026.
  • One paper was accepted as an oral paper at ECCV 2026.
  • Started my Ph.D. in the UCLA Mobility Lab.
  • One paper was accepted to ICLR 2026.
  • Started a research internship at Honda Research Institute USA.
  • One paper was accepted to NeurIPS 2025.
Earlier news
  • One paper was accepted to NeurIPS 2024.
  • Started my M.S. in CICS at UMass Amherst.
  • One paper was accepted to CVPR 2024.
  • Received the National Scholarship in China.
  • One paper was accepted to NeurIPS 2023.
  • Joined MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab as an intern.
  • I had the honor of starring in the promotional video of Zhejiang University.

Experience

  • 2025.12 – Present

    Research Intern, Honda Research Institute USA

    Multi-modal scene representation and navigation in Habitat; Advisor: Nirav Savaliya.

  • 2025.06 – 2025.11

    Research Leader, Vision and Learning Lab, UC Merced

    Led Edit3r on instant 3D scene editing from sparse, unposed images; Advisor: Ming-Hsuan Yang.

  • 2025.02 – 2025.06

    Research Leader, Microsoft Research

    MindJourney: Test-time scaling with controllable world models for 3D spatial reasoning; Advisor: Jianwei Yang.

  • 2023.11 – 2024.06

    Research Leader, MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab

    ARCHITECT and RILA for 3D scene generation and audio-visual navigation;

Education

  • 2026.05 – Present

    Ph.D. in Civil and Environmental Engineering, UCLA

    Mobility Lab; advised by Jiaqi Ma.

  • 2024.09 – 2025.12

    M.S. in Computer Science, University of Massachusetts Amherst

    College of Information and Computer Sciences (GPA: 4.00/4.00).

  • 2020.09 – 2024.07

    B.S. in Artificial Intelligence, Zhejiang University

    Turing Class, Chu Kochen Honors College; GPA: 3.75/4.00 (Major GPA 3.96/4.00).

Academic Service

Conference Reviewer: NeurIPS 2025, NeurIPS 2026, CVPR 2026, ICLR 2027
Journal Reviewer: IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI), IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering (TASE), IEEE Open Journal of Intelligent Transportation Systems (OJ-ITS)

Get in Touch

Feel free to reach out at jiagengliu02@g.ucla.edu.

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