Xian Liu

Research Scientist
NVIDIA Research
Santa Clara, CA

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Biography

I am a research scientist at NVIDIA Research, Deep Imagination Research Group, working on the foundation generative models, with special focus on the GenAI pre/middle/post-training, visual tokenizers, and their applications in digital human and embodied AI.

I am the core contributor to the NVIDIA Cosmos series GitHub stars , an ensemble of open-source world foundation models including visual tokenizers, image / video foundation models, vision-language models, and their post-trained variants.

I obtained Ph.D. degree at CUHK MMLab, supervised by Prof. Dahua Lin, Prof. Ziwei Liu, and Prof. Xihui Liu. Before that, I received Bachelor's degree at Zhejiang University in 2021, advised by Prof. Xiaowei Zhou. During my research journey, I am glad to take multiple industrial internships at NVIDIA Research, Snap Research, Tencent AI Lab, SenseTime Research, and Shanghai AI Lab.

I am always open to discussions and collaborations, feel free to drop me an email if you are interested in :)

News

  • [07/2025] One paper is accepted to ICCV 2025 with oral presentation.
  • [06/2025] Pass my Ph.D. defense and become Dr. Liu officially!
  • [06/2025] We release Cosmos-Predict2, a world foundation model with improved quality. Models open-sourced on Github and HF.
  • [03/2025] We release Cosmos-Transfer1, a world model with multi-modal controllability. Models open-sourced on Github and HF.
  • [02/2025] Two papers are accepted to CVPR 2025.
  • [01/2025] Cosmos won the Best of CES, Best of AI, and Best Overall Awards in CNET 2025!
  • [01/2025] We release Cosmos, a world foundation model platform for Physical AI. Models open-sourced on Github and HF.
[Show more]

Industrial Research

Cosmos World Foundation Model Platform for Physical AI
NVIDIA Research: Xian Liu (Core Contributor).
Contributions: Auto-Regressive Foundation Model Pre-Training & Post-Training. (CES'25 Best of AI, Best Overall)
Cosmos Tokenizer: A Suite of Image and Video Neural Tokenizers
NVIDIA Research: Xian Liu (Core Contributor).
Contributions: Continuous/Discrete Image/Video Tokenizers.
Cosmos-Transfer1: World Generation with Adaptive Multimodal Control
NVIDIA Research: Xian Liu (Core Contributor).
Contributions: Adaptive Multi-Modal Control, Data Processing Pipelines, Open-Source Repo.
Cosmos-Predict2: World Foundation Model Platform for Physical AI
NVIDIA Research: Xian Liu (Core Contributor).
Contributions: Data Processing Pipelines, Captioning, Long Video Generation, Transfer Post-training.

Selected Publications [ Full List ] (* indicates equal contribution)

DPoser-X: Diffusion Model as Robust 3D Whole-body Human Pose Prior
Junzhe Lu, Jing Lin, Hongkun Dou, Ailing Zeng, Yue Deng, Xian Liu, Zhongang Cai, Lei Yang, Yulun Zhang, Haoqian Wang, Ziwei Liu.
International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2025. (Oral)
HumanGaussian: Text-Driven 3D Human Generation with Gaussian Splatting
Xian Liu, Xiaohang Zhan, Jiaxiang Tang, Ying Shan, Gang Zeng, Dahua Lin, Xihui Liu, Ziwei Liu.
IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024. (Highlight, Top 2.8%)
HyperHuman: Hyper-Realistic Human Generation with Latent Structural Diffusion
Xian Liu, Jian Ren, Aliaksandr Siarohin, Ivan Skorokhodov, Yanyu Li, Dahua Lin, Xihui Liu, Ziwei Liu, Sergey Tulyakov.
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2024. (Review Score 6, 6, 8, 10, Top 1.6%, Rank)
Semantic-Aware Implicit Neural Audio-Driven Video Portrait Generation
Xian Liu, Yinghao Xu, Qianyi Wu, Hang Zhou, Wayne Wu, Bolei Zhou.
European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022. (Oral, Top 2.7%)
Audio-Driven Co-Speech Gesture Video Generation
Xian Liu, Qianyi Wu, Hang Zhou, Yuanqi Du, Wayne Wu, Dahua Lin, Ziwei Liu.
Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2022. (Spotlight, Top 5%)
Learning Hierarchical Cross-Modal Association for Co-Speech Gesture Generation
Xian Liu, Qianyi Wu, Hang Zhou, Yinghao Xu, Rui Qian, Xinyi Lin, Xiaowei Zhou, Wayne Wu, Bo Dai, Bolei Zhou.
IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2022.
Also appears at CVPR 2022 Sight and Sound Workshop. [5-min Invited Talk] (link)
Taming Diffusion Models for Audio-Driven Co-Speech Gesture Generation
Xian Liu*, Lingting Zhu*, Xuanyu Liu, Rui Qian, Ziwei Liu, Lequan Yu.
IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2023.
Visual Sound Localization in the Wild by Cross-Modal Interference Erasing
Xian Liu*, Rui Qian*, Hang Zhou*, Di Hu, Weiyao Lin, Ziwei Liu, Bolei Zhou, Xiaowei Zhou.
AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2022.
HMAR: Efficient Hierarchical Masked AutoRegressive Image Generation
Hermann Kumbong*, Xian Liu*, Tsung-Yi Lin, Xihui Liu, Ziwei Liu, Daniel Y. Fu, Ming-Yu Liu, Christopher Ré, David W. Romero.
IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2025.
TC4D: Trajectory-Conditioned Text-to-4D Generation
Sherwin Bahmani*, Xian Liu*, Yifan Wang*, Ivan Skorokhodov, Victor Rong, Ziwei Liu, Xihui Liu, Jeong Joon Park, Sergey Tulyakov, Gordon Wetzstein, Andrea Tagliasacchi, David B. Lindell.
European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2024.
3DTrajMaster: Mastering 3D Trajectory for Multi-Entity Motion in Video Generation
Xiao Fu, Xian Liu, Xintao Wang, Sida Peng, Menghan Xia, Xiaoyu Shi, Ziyang Yuan, Pengfei Wan, Di Zhang, Dahua Lin.
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2025.
High-Quality Joint Image and Video Tokenization with Causal VAE
Dawit Mureja Argaw, Xian Liu, Qinsheng Zhang, Joon Son Chung, Ming-Yu Liu, Fitsum Reda.
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2025.
BrushNet: A Plug-and-Play Image Inpainting Model with Decomposed Dual-Branch Diffusion
Xuan Ju, Xian Liu, Xintao Wang, Yuxuan Bian, Ying Shan, Qiang Xu.
European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2024.
TextCraftor: Your Text Encoder Can be Image Quality Controller
Yanyu Li, Xian Liu, Anil Kag, Ju Hu, Yerlan Idelbayev, Dhritiman Sagar, Yanzhi Wang, Sergey Tulyakov, Jian Ren.
IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024.

Experiences

Research Scientist.
Jun. 2024 - Now
NVIDIA Research, Deep Imagination Research Group.
Manager: Ming-Yu Liu.
Generative AI Research Intern, Deep Imagination Research, NVIDIA Research.
Mar. 2024 - Jun. 2024
Topic: Image/Video Foundation Models, Tokenizers, Multi-Modal Language Models.
Research Visiting Student, Toronto Computational Imaging Group.
Dec. 2023 - Mar. 2024
Topic: Text-to-4D Generation.
Research Intern, Tencent AI Laboratory.
Sept. 2023 - Dec. 2023
Topic: Text-Driven 3D Human Generation.
Supervised by: Xiaohang Zhan, Ying Shan.
Research Intern, Creative Vision Group, Snap Research.
May. 2023 - Sept. 2023
Topic: Human Generation Foundation Model.
Research Intern, Digital Content Group, Shanghai AI Laboratory.
Jul. 2021 - Feb. 2022
Topic: Digital Human, Gesture Generation.
Supervised by: Hang Zhou, Wayne Wu.
Research Intern, Intelligent Video Group, SenseTime Research.
Aug. 2020 - Jun. 2021
Topic: Digital Human, Face Animation.
Supervised by: Qianyi Wu, Bo Dai.

Invited Talks

Professional Services

  • Conference Program Committee / Reviewer: CVPR, ECCV, ICCV, WACV, SIGGRAPH, SIGGRAPH Asia, NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, AISTATS, AAAI, ACM MM.
  • Journal Reviewer: TPAMI, IJCV, TVCG, EG, CGF, PG.

Selected Honors & Awards

  • CNET 2025 Best of CES, Best of AI, and Best Overall.
    2025
  • ECCV Outstanding Reviewer Award.
    2024
  • CVPR Travel Award.
    2024
  • ICLR Travel Award.
    2024
  • National Scholarship.
    2019, 2020
  • Hong Kong Ph.D. Fellowship Scheme (HKPFS).
    2021- 2025
  • Outstanding Graduate of Zhejiang Province.
    2021
  • Outstanding Bachelor Thesis Award of Zhejiang University, Top 1%.
    2021
  • UCLA CSST Scholarship Program.
    2020
  • SenseTime Scholarship.
    2020
  • Tang Lixin Scholarship.
    2019
  • First Class Scholarship for Academic Excellence.
    2019, 2020

Teaching Experience

  • ENGG 1120, Linear Algebra for Engineers.
    Spring 2022.
  • ENGG 2440, Discrete Mathematics for Engineers.
    Fall 2021.