Shaowei Liu

I'm a final-year PhD candidate in CS at UIUC, working with Prof. Shenlong Wang and Prof. Saurabh Gupta.

I received my master's degree in CS from UCSD, advised by Prof. Xiaolong Wang. Before that, I received my bachelor's degree in EE from Tsinghua University.

My research focuses on interactive world models, spanning video generation, 3D/4D generation, and robotics. I am currently working on video models that reason about physics and motion causality, and scalable 3D world models for robotic manipulation.

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I am graduating in Spring 2026 and looking for industry or academic positions. Feel free to reach out if you think I'd be a good fit.

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Email: shaowei3@illinois.edu

Preprints
Image MoRight: Motion Control Done Right
Shaowei Liu, Xuanchi Ren, Tianchang Shen, Huan Ling, Saurabh Gupta, Shenlong Wang, Sanja Fidler, Jun Gao
Preprint, 2026.
Paper Project Code TL;DR
Controllable video generation with disentangled camera-object motion control and causal motion reasoning.
Image MoRe: Mixture-of-Experts for Multi-Physics Robotic World Models
Ziyu Zhu, Shaowei Liu, Albert Zhai, Henry Che, Shenlong Wang
Preprint, 2026.
Paper Project Code TL;DR
3D world model with Mixture of motion experts for multi-physics robotic manipulation.
Image Data-Forcing Distillation: Restoring Diversity and Fidelity in Few-Step Video Generation
Siyi Chen, Shaowei Liu, Yixuan Jia, Zian Wang, Huan Ling, Qing Qu, Jun Gao

Publications
Image VisualSync: Multi-Camera Synchronization via Cross-View Object Motion
Shaowei Liu*, David Yifan Yao*, Saurabh Gupta†, Shenlong Wang†
Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2025.
Paper Project Code TL;DR
Align unsynchronized multi-view videos by matching object motion with epipolar cues.
Image Ponimator: Unfolding Interactive Pose for Versatile Human-Human Interaction Animation
Shaowei Liu, Chuan Guo*, Bing Zhou*, Jian Wang*
International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2025.
Paper Project Code TL;DR
Interaction human-human motion animation and generation anchored on interactive poses.
Image PhysGen3D: Crafting a Miniature Interactive World from a Single Image
Boyuan Chen, Hanxiao Jiang, Shaowei Liu, Saurabh Gupta, Yunzhu Li, Hao Zhao, Shenlong Wang
Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2025.
Paper Project Code TL;DR
Synthesizes video of a miniature interactive world from a single image.
Image PhysGen: Rigid-Body Physics-Grounded Image-to-Video Generation
Shaowei Liu, Zhongzheng Ren, Saurabh Gupta*, Shenlong Wang*
European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2024.
Paper Project Code TL;DR
Image-to-video generation pipeline integrates physical simulation and video diffusion prior.
Image ContactGen: Generative Contact Modeling for Grasp Generation
Shaowei Liu, Yang Zhou, Jimei Yang, Saurabh Gupta*, Shenlong Wang*
International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2023.
Paper Project Code TL;DR
A novel object-centric contact representation for hand-object interaction.
Image Building Rearticulable Models for Arbitrary 3D Objects from 4D Point Clouds
Shaowei Liu, Saurabh Gupta*, Shenlong Wang*
Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2023.
Paper Project Code TL;DR
Build animatable 3D models from arbitrary articulated object point cloud sequence.
Image CASA: Category-agnostic Skeletal Animal Reconstruction
Yuefan Wu*, Zeyuan Chen*, Shaowei Liu, Zhongzheng Ren, Shenlong Wang
Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2022.
Paper Project Code TL;DR
Category-agnostic 3D animal reconstruction from a monocular video.
Image DexMV: Imitation Learning for Dexterous Manipulation from Human Videos
Yuzhe Qin*, Yueh-Hua Wu*, Shaowei Liu, Hanwen Jiang, Ruihan Yang, Yang Fu, Xiaolong Wang
European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022.
Paper Project Code TL;DR
A new platform and pipeline for dexterous manipulation from videos.
Image Joint Hand Motion and Interaction Hotspots Prediction from Egocentric Videos
Shaowei Liu, Subarna Tripathi, Somdeb Majumdar, Xiaolong Wang
Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2022.
Paper Project Code TL;DR
Forecast future hand-object interactions given an egocentric video.
Image Hand-Object Contact Consistency Reasoning for Human Grasps Generation
Hanwen Jiang*, Shaowei Liu*, Jiashun Wang and Xiaolong Wang
International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Oral).
Paper Project Code TL;DR
Generate natural human grasps given a 3D object in the world.
Image Semi-Supervised 3D Hand-Object Poses Estimation with Interactions in Time
Shaowei Liu*, Hanwen Jiang*, Jiarui Xu, Sifei Liu and Xiaolong Wang
Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021.
Paper Project Code TL;DR
Build a joint learning framework for estimating the 3D hand and object poses.
Image Light and Fast Hand Pose Estimation From Spatial-Decomposed Latent Heatmap
Shaowei Liu, Guijin Wang, Pengwei Xie, Cairong Zhang
IEEE Access, 2020.
Paper BibTeX TL;DR
A light and efficient approach for depth-based hand pose estimation.
Experiences
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Intel AI Lab
Multimodal Learning Intern
Jun. 21 - Aug. 21

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Adobe Research
Intern - Research Scientist
June. 22 - Nov. 22

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Snap Research
Intern - Research Scientist
June. 24 - Dec. 24

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Nvidia Spatial Intelligence Lab
Intern - Research Scientist
May. 25 - May. 26