Yan Zhang

• [Oct. 2026] Serve as area chair for CVPR’27.
• [May. 2026] EgoGen wins the EgoVis 2024/2025 Distinguished Paper Award.
• [May. 2026] Awarded as outstanding area chair at CVPR’26.
• [Aug. 2025] Serve as area chair for CVPR’26.
• [Aug. 2025] serve on the Senior Program Committee, AAAI’26
• [Jun. 2025] PRIMAL is accepted by ICCV’25.
• [Apr. 2025] Guest lecturer of Artificial Intelligence for Digital Characters, ETH Zurich.

Chair & Review

• Area Chair: 3DV'24, CVPR'24,25,26,27
• serve on the Senior Program Committee, AAAI'26
• Reviewers of Siggraph Asia'23, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, 3DV regularly
• TPAMI, EuroGraphics

Activities

• Organizer of the workshop 3D Human Understanding: Towards Human-centric World Models, ECCV,26.</li>
• Organizer of the workshop New Challenges in 3D Human Understanding at CVPR'25.
• Organizer of the workshop Foundation Models for 3D Humans at ECCV'24.
• Invited guest lecture of RL in Behavior Modeling in Artificial Intelligence for Digital Characters - SS 24/25 Computer Graphics Lab, ETH Zurich.
• Organizer of the workshop Human Body, Hands, and Activities from Egocentric and Multi-view Cameras at ECCV'22.
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Other Affiliations

• Max-Planck ETH Center for Learning Systems (CLS), 2020-2023
• ETH AI Center, 2020-2023
</div> ## Teaching

Co-supervised Student Projects at ETH Zurich

• Pascal Troxler & Onat Vuran, Multiview hand motion capture with diffusion models in Immsersive Design Lab, 2023
• Chuqiao Li, 3D human pose estimation from egocentric images, 2023
• Haoliang Shang, Retargeting SMPL-X bodies to Metahumans, 2023
• Yelan Tao, Virtual Humans meet Real Drones: Drone flight simulation in populated scenes, 2023
• Lukas Bösiger, Navigating digital humans in mixed reality, 2022
• Kaifeng Zhao, Semantically Controllable Human-Scene Interaction Synthesis, 2022
• Jonathan Lehner, Digital human navigation in the verticle city, 2022
• Yan Wu & Jiahao Wang, Stochastic Whole-Body Grasping with Contact, 2021
• Dexin Yang, 4D Human Body Capture from Egocentric Video via 3D Scene Grounding, 2020
• Siwei Zhang, Proximity learning of articulation and contact in 3D environments, 2020

Lectures at ETH Zurich

• Reinforcement Learning in Behavior Modeling, Artificial Intelligence for Digital Characters, 2024
• Human motion modeling I and II, Virtual Humans, 2022
• The wanderings of Odysseus in 3D scenes, Mixed Reality, 2022

Seminars at ETH Zurich

• Seminar in Advanced Topics in Vision, 2020,2021,2022,2023
• Seminar on Digital Humans, 2022,2023

Selected Publications

Please see all at Google Scholar
1. arxiv

   Open-Vocabulary Functional 3D Human-Scene Interaction Generation

   Jie Liu, Yu Sun, Alpár Cseke, Yao Feng, Nicolas Heron, Michael J. Black, Yan Zhang

   arXiv, 2026.

   An agentic approach to generate 3D HSI in the open world with open-vocabulary command

   PDF Code Project Page
2. ICCV

   PRIMAL: Physically Reactive and Interactive Motor Model for Avatar Learning

   Yan Zhang, Yao Feng, Alpár Cseke, Nitin Saini, Nathan Bajandas, Nicolas Heron, Michael J. Black

   International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2025.

   A diffusion model produces avatar's motions and reactions in real time.

   PDF Code Project Page
3. CVPR

   Degrees of Freedom Matter: Inferring Dynamics from Point Trajectories

   Yan Zhang, Sergey Prokudin, Marko Mihajlovic, Qianli Ma, Siyu Tang

   IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024.

   A compact implicit motion field with spatiotemporal regularity.

   PDF Code Project Page
4. CVPR

   EgoGen: An Egocentric Synthetic Data Generator

   Gen Li, Kaifeng Zhao, Siwei Zhang, Xiaozhong Lyu, Mihai Dusmanu, Yan Zhang, Marc Pollefeys, Siyu Tang

   IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024. (ORAL)

   Human motion synthesis with egocentric visual perception; Rendered synthetic data boosts several egocentric vision tasks.

   PDF Code Project Page
5. CVPR

   Lodge: A Coarse to Fine Diffusion Network for Long Dance Generation Guided by the Characteristic Dance Primitives

   Ronghui Li, YuXiang Zhang, Yachao Zhang, Hongwen Zhang, Jie Guo, Yan Zhang, Yebin Liu, Xiu Li

   IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024.

   A two-stage coarse-to-fine diffusion architecture for extremely long dance generation; characteristic dance primitives.

   PDF Code Project Page
6. ICCV

   Synthesizing Diverse Human Motions in 3D Indoor Scenes

   Kaifeng Zhao, Yan Zhang, Shaofei Wang, Thabo Beeler, Siyu Tang

   IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2023.

   Generative motion pritimives + RL to synthesize lifelike behavior in 3D scenes.

   PDF Code Project Page
7. ICCV

   Probabilistic Human Mesh Recovery in 3D Scenes from Egocentric Views

   Siwei Zhang, Qianli Ma, Yan Zhang, Sadegh Aliakbarian, Darren Cosker, Siyu Tang

   IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2023. (ORAL)

   A scene-conditioned diffusion model regresses 3D bodies from single images. The denoising process guided by COAP solves interpenetration.

   PDF Code Project Page
8. CVPR

   The wanderings of odysseus in 3D scenes

   Yan Zhang, Siyu Tang

   IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2022.

   Generative motion pritimives + RL to synthesize locomotion behavior of diverse human identities. Featured at the homepage of ETH Zurich.

   PDF Code Project Page
9. CVPR

   We are More than Our Joints: Predicting how 3D Bodies Move

   Yan Zhang, Michael J. Black, Siyu Tang

   IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021.

   A novel marker-based body representation for stochastic motion prediction.

   PDF Code Project Page
10. CVPR

    Generating 3d people in scenes without people

    Yan Zhang, Mohamed Hassan, Heiko Neumann, Michael J Black, Siyu Tang

    IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020 (ORAL) .

    generative model to populate scenes + test-time optimization

    PDF Code Project Page
11. ECCV

    Egobody: Human body shape and motion of interacting people from head-mounted devices

    Siwei Zhang, Qianli Ma, Yan Zhang, Zhiyin Qian, Taein Kwon, Marc Pollefeys, Federica Bogo & Siyu Tang

    European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022.

    A dataset of people interactions in 3D scenes, captured by Kinects and Hololens.

    PDF Code Project Page
12. ICCV

    Learning motion priors for 4d human body capture in 3d scenes

    Siwei Zhang, Yan Zhang, Federica Bogo, Marc Pollefeys, Siyu Tang

    IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (ORAL) .

    Marker motion priors to capture body motions in 3D scenes.

    PDF Code Project Page