Yichen Sheng

I am a research scientist in NVIDIA. I was fortunate to work with Prof. Bedrich Benes and Jianming Zhang and obtained my PhD at Purdue CS in 2024.

My mission is to create a photorealistic virtual world (the ultimate goal of computer graphics, recent fancy name: world model) no matter in which form. Currently I focus on generative rendering and scalable ways to create a digital twin for real world. I believe this is the first step towards real spaital intelligence.

I am driven by the conviction that the most meaningful advances arise from deep insight rather than complexity. My work embodies this view by turning principled understanding into simple designs with enduring real-world impact.

Lighting Effects Synthesis Trilogy (SSN, SSG, PixHtLab) — featured at Adobe MAX 2021
DrBokeh — fixed the bokeh formula; surpassed Google Pixel Camera with a principled method
IScene — simple and effective formulation with limited data; outperformed SAM3D with unprecedented data scale.

I am hiring research intern in 2026(summar/fall) to work on scalable way for world models. I am also open to any forms of research collaborations. Please shot me an email if we have common interests.

Email / GitHub / Google Scholar / LinkedIn / CV

Research

	I-Scene: 3D Instance Models are Implicit Generalizable Spatial Learners Lu Ling, Yunhao Ge, Yichen Sheng, Aniket Bera Under Review > proj > arxiv > code
	PixelDiT: Pixel Diffusion Transformers for Image Generation Yongsheng Yu, Wei Xiong†, Weili Nie, Yichen Sheng, Shiqiu Liu, Jiebo Luo Under Review > proj > arxiv
	Scenethesis: Combining Language and Visual Priors for 3D Scene Generation Lu Ling, Chen-Hsuan Lin, Tsung-Yi Lin, Yifan Ding, Yu Zeng, Yichen Sheng, Yunhao Ge, Ming-Yu Liu, Aniket Bera, Max Li ICLR 2026 > proj > arxiv
	Generative Photography: Scene-Consistent Camera Control for Realistic Text-to-Image Synthesis Yu Yuan, Xijun Wang, Yichen Sheng, Prateek Chennuri, Xingguang Zhang, Stanley Chan CVPR 2025 (highlight) > proj > arxiv
	Floating No More: Object-Ground Reconstruction from a Single Image Yunze Man, Yichen Sheng, Jianming Zhang, Liangyan Gui, Yu-Xiong Wang CVPR 2025 > proj > arxiv
	Dr.Bokeh: DiffeRentiable Occlusion-aware Bokeh Rendering Yichen Sheng, Zixun Yu, Lu Ling, Zhiwen Cao, Cecilia Zhang, Xin Lu, Ke Xian, Haiting Lin, Bedrich Benes CVPR 2024 > proj > video
	DL3DV-10K: A Large-Scale Scene Dataset for Deep Learning-based 3D Vision Lu Ling, Yichen Sheng(joint first author)*, Zhi Tu, Wentian Zhao, Cheng Xin, Kun Wan, Lantao Yu, Qianyu Guo, Zixun Yu, Yawen Lu, Xuanmao Li, Xingpeng Sun, Rohan Ashok, Aniruddha Mukherjee, Hao Kang, Xiangrui Kong, Gang Hua, Tianyi Zhang, Bedrich Benes, Aniket Bera CVPR 2024* > proj > arxiv > code
	PixHt-Lab: Pixel Height Based Light Effect Generation for Image Compositing Yichen Sheng, Jianming Zhang, Julien Philip, Yannick Hold-Geoffroy, Xin Sun, HE Zhang, Lu Ling, Bedrich Benes CVPR 2023 (highlight) > proj > arxiv > code
	Controllable Shadow Generation Using Pixel Height Maps Yichen Sheng* , Yifan Liu* (R.I.P.🕯️), Jianming Zhang, Wei Yin, A. Cengiz Oztireli, He Zhang, Zhe Lin, Eli Shechtman, Bedrich Benes. (Joint first author) ECCV 2022* > proj > arxiv > video > Adobe Max
	SSN: Soft Shadow Network for Image Composition Yichen Sheng, Jianming Zhang, Bedrich Benes CVPR 2021 (oral) > proj > arxiv > video > code