Zhi Cen

I am currently a CS Ph.D. student at the State Key Laboratory of CAD & CG, Zhejiang University, advised by Prof. Xiaowei Zhou and Sida Peng. My research interests lie in human motion generation, human video generation and human motion capture.

I completed my undergraduate studies at the Zhejiang University - University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Institute, majoring in Electrical and Computer Engineering. I earned a B.Eng. degree from ZJU and a B.Sci. degree from UIUC.

I am expected to graduate in 2026 and am actively looking for job opportunities.

Email / Scholar / Github

Publications

* indicates equal contributions.

	UnityVideo: Unified Multi-Modal Multi-Task Learning for Enhancing World-Aware Video Generation Jiehui Huang, Yuecheng Zhang, Xu He, Yuan Gao, Zhi Cen, Bin Xia, Yan Zhou, Xin Tao, Pengfei Wan, Jiaya Jia arxiv, 2025 project page / arXiv
	StreamingTalker: Audio-driven 3D Facial Animation with Autoregressive Diffusion Model Yifan Yang, Zhi Cen, Sida Peng, Xiangwei Chen, Yifu Deng, Xinyu Zhu, Fan Jia, Xiaowei Zhou, Hujun Bao AAAI, 2025 (Oral) project page / arXiv
	CoDA: Coordinated Diffusion Noise Optimization for Whole-Body Manipulation of Articulated Objects Huaijin Pi, Zhi Cen, Zhiyang Dou, Taku Komura NeurIPS, 2025 project page / arXiv
	Generating Full Body Grasping Motion from the First-person Perspective Zhi Cen, Yihui Yang, Huaijin Pi, Sida Peng, Xiaowei Zhou CCF CAD & CG, 2025
	Ready-to-React: Online Reaction Policy for Two-Character Interaction Generation Zhi Cen, Huaijin Pi, Sida Peng, Qing Shuai, Yujun Shen, Hujun Bao, Xiaowei Zhou, Ruizhen Hu ICLR, 2025 project page / arXiv
	World-Grounded Human Motion Recovery via Gravity-View Coordinates Zehong Shen, Huaijin Pi, Yan Xia, Zhi Cen, Sida Peng, Zechen Hu, Hujun Bao, Ruizhen Hu, Xiaowei Zhou Siggraph Asia, 2024 project page / arXiv
	Generating Human Motion in 3D Scenes from Text Descriptions Zhi Cen, Huaijin Pi, Sida Peng, Zehong Shen, Minghui Yang, Shuai Zhu, Hujun Bao, Xiaowei Zhou CVPR, 2024 project page / arXiv
	Learning Human Mesh Recovery in 3D Scenes Zehong Shen, Zhi Cen, Sida Peng, Qing Shuai, Hujun Bao, Xiaowei Zhou CVPR, 2023 project page / arXiv