Yifeng Jiang

Research Scientist

NVIDIA

E-mail: yifengj at nvidia dot com


About

I am a Research Scientist at NVIDIA Research, based in Santa Clara, CA, USA. Previously, I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University, advised by Prof. C. Karen Liu, and my M.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Georgia Tech. Prior to attending graduate school, I got my Bachelor's degree from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, where I was a member of the University of Michigan – Shanghai Jiao Tong University Joint Institute.

As a simulation and robotics researcher, I explore new methods that combine machine learning and simulation-based techniques to build AI-driven Digital Humans, and to enable humanoid robots with naturalistic movements through physics simulation and learning-based motor control. Besides motion generation, I have worked on human motion inference using wearable sensors, such as smart glasses, and on developing next-generation human simulations for biomechanics and healthcare applications.


Research

ProtoMotions3: A GPU-Accelerated Framework for Simulated Humanoids

Chen Tessler*, Yifeng Jiang*, Xue Bin Peng, Erwin Coumans, Yi Shi, Haotian Zhang, Davis Rempe, Gal Chechik, Sanja Fidler

Open-source Framework, 2025

[Code]

GPC: Large-Scale Generative Pretraining for Transferable Motor Control

Yi Shi, Yifeng Jiang, Chen Tessler, Xue Bin Peng

Proceedings of SIGGRAPH, 2026

[Website]

Kimodo: Scaling Controllable Human Motion Generation

Davis Rempe, Mathis Petrovich, Ye Yuan, Haotian Zhang, Xue Bin Peng, Yifeng Jiang, Tingwu Wang, Umar Iqbal, David Minor, Michael de Ruyter, Jiefeng Li, Chen Tessler, et al.

Technical Report, 2026

[Website]

HIL: Hybrid Imitation Learning for Dynamic Athletic Control

Jiashun Wang, Yifeng Jiang, Haotian Zhang, Chen Tessler, Davis Rempe, Jessica Hodgins, Xue Bin Peng

ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG), 2026

[Paper]

DMP: Directable Motion Retargeting through Motion Paraphrasing

Sunmin Lee, Davis Rempe, Yifeng Jiang, Haotian Zhang, Tingwu Wang, Jungdam Won, Xue Bin Peng

ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG), 2026

[Paper]

MaskedManipulator: Versatile Whole-Body Control for Loco-Manipulation

Chen Tessler, Yifeng Jiang, Erwin Coumans, Zhengyi Luo, Xue Bin Peng, Gal Chechik

Proceedings of SIGGRAPH Asia, 2025

[Paper]

HMD^2: Environment-aware Motion Generation from Single Egocentric Head-Mounted Device

Vladimir Guzov*, Yifeng Jiang*, Fangzhou Hong, Gerard Pons-Moll, Richard Newcombe, C. Karen Liu, Yuting Ye, Lingni Ma

International Conference on 3D Vision (3DV), 2025

[Website] [Paper] [Video]

Constrained Diffusion with Trust Sampling

William Huang, Yifeng Jiang, Tom Van Wouwe, C. Karen Liu

Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2024

[Paper]

Nymeria: A Massive Collection of Multimodal Egocentric Daily Motion in the Wild

Lingni Ma, Yuting Ye, Fangzhou Hong, Vladimir Guzov, Yifeng Jiang, Rowan Postyeni, Luis Pesqueira, Alexander Gamino, Vijay Baiyya, Hyo Jin Kim, Kevin Bailey, David S. Fosas, C. Karen Liu, Ziwei Liu, Jakob Engel, Renzo De Nardi, Richard Newcombe

European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2024

[Website] [Paper] [Data]

DROP: Dynamics Responses from Human Motion Prior and Projective Dynamics

Yifeng Jiang, Jungdam Won, Yuting Ye, and C. Karen Liu

Proceedings of SIGGRAPH Asia, 2023

[Website] [Paper] [Video]

Anatomically Detailed Simulation of Human Torso

Seunghwan Lee, Yifeng Jiang, and C. Karen Liu

Proceedings of SIGGRAPH, 2023

[arXiv] [Video]

Benchmarking Rigid Body Contact Models

Michelle Guo, Yifeng Jiang, Andrew Everett Spielberg, Jiajun Wu, and C. Karen Liu

Learning for Dynamics & Control Conference (L4DC), 2023

[Paper] [Website]

Transformer Inertial Poser: Real-time Human Motion Reconstruction from Sparse IMUs with Simultaneous Terrain Generation

Yifeng Jiang, Yuting Ye, Deepak Gopinath, Jungdam Won, Alexander W. Winkler, and C. Karen Liu

Proceedings of SIGGRAPH Asia, 2022

[arXiv] [Video] [Code]

Data-Augmented Contact Model for Rigid Body Simulation

Yifeng Jiang, Jiazheng Sun, and C. Karen Liu

Learning for Dynamics & Control Conference (L4DC), 2022

[arXiv] [Video]

DASH: Modularized Human Manipulation Simulation with Vision and Language for Embodied AI

Yifeng Jiang, Michelle Guo, Jiangshan Li, Ioannis Exarchos, Jiajun Wu, and C. Karen Liu

ACM SIGGRAPH / Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation (SCA), 2021

[arXiv] [Video] [Talk Slides] [Code]

SimGAN: Hybrid Simulator Identification for Domain Adaptation via Adversarial Reinforcement Learning

Yifeng Jiang, Tingnan Zhang, Daniel Ho, Yunfei Bai, C. Karen Liu, Sergey Levine, and Jie Tan

IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2021

[arXiv] [Video] [Talk Slides] [Code] [Google AI Blog]

Policy Transfer via Kinematic Domain Randomization and Adaptation

Ioannis Exarchos, Yifeng Jiang, Wenhao Yu, and C. Karen Liu

IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2021

[arXiv] [Code]

Synthesis of Biologically Realistic Human Motion Using Joint Torque Actuation

Yifeng Jiang, Tom Van Wouwe, Friedl De Groote, and C. Karen Liu

Proceedings of SIGGRAPH, 2019

[arXiv] [Video] [Talk Slides] [Code: Part1] [Code: Part2]

Data-Driven Approach to Simulating Realistic Human Joint Constraints

Yifeng Jiang and C. Karen Liu

IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2018

[arXiv] [Video] [Code: training] [Code: usage]

Awards

Meta Research PhD Fellowship Finalist

School of Engineering Fellowship

Outstanding Graduate of Shanghai

Shanghai Scholarship for Distinguished Undergrads


Professional Activities

Conference & Journal Reviewers: TVCG, RSS, IROS, CoRL, ACM ToG, SIGGRAPH, SIGGRAPH Asia, RA-L, T-RO, IMWUT (UbiComp), EuroGraphics, L4DC


Miscellaneous and Resources

I am fan of classical music. Here is an introductory list where I picked some of the most well-known pieces - those I feel being accessible to people who are interested in classical music, but do not know where to start. My favorite musician is Tchaikovsky.

I am also interested in psychology. Psychology and Life (Chinese Edition Here) is one of the best introductory books. I found reasoning about Nature vs Nurture a very good way to combat unconscious biases. I also enjoyed a lot watching Dr. Tal Ben-Shahar's open course on Positive Psychology (Chinese Translations Here). Finally, a wonderful (full of humor) introductory course at Yale.

My favorite books are Gone with the Wind, One Hundred Years of Solitude, and The Three-Body Problem.

An small visual catalog I made of some of the over 400 kinds of trees on Stanford campus.