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Yan Zhang

Research Engineer
Epic Games
yan@meshcapade.com


homepage at ETH Zurich       homepage at MPI Tuebingen

About Me

I am a senior research engineer at Epic Games. My research experiences have been focusing on generative human foundation models, covering human motion and behavior synthesis, 3D human perception, generative models, and their applications in AR/VR, embodied AI, interactive avatar, and beyond.

Short Bio

News

Services

Chair & Review

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

Activities

Other Affiliations

  • Max-Planck ETH Center for Learning Systems (CLS), 2020-2023
  • ETH AI Center, 2020-2023

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

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. 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
  2. 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
  3. 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
  4. 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
  5. 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
  6. 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
  7. 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
  8. 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
  9. 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
  10. 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
  11. 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


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