I am a PhD student in the Machine Learning Systems CDT at the University of Edinburgh, supervised by Laura Sevilla-Lara and Oisin Mac Aodha. Before Edinburgh, I received my M.Eng. from the Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, advised by Dong-Ming Yan and Weize Quan, and my B.Eng. in Computer Science from the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences.

My research is about how visual models represent the physical structure of the world, and how that structure can be made controllable. I currently focus on camera motion in video, and more broadly on whether such structure already emerges inside large pretrained models and can be reused across understanding, prediction and generation.

Earlier I worked on data-driven inverse problems in geometry processing, audio-driven talking-face generation, and composition-aware unified multimodal models — different problems, one question: what a model should represent explicitly, and what it should be left to infer.

I am open to research internship opportunities — feel free to get in touch.

News

  • 2026.09Two papers accepted to NeurIPS 2026.
  • 2026.06One paper accepted to ECCV 2026.
  • 2025.09Started my PhD at the University of Edinburgh.
  • 2024.12Two papers accepted to AAAI 2025 and ICASSP 2025.
  • 2024.03One paper accepted to IEEE TVCG.

Publications

CineGen teaser
Ziqi Zhou, Yujian Yuan, Laura Sevilla-Lara
NeurIPS 2026Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems
Object-Uni teaser
Mining Tan*, Yinuo Wang*, Ziqi Zhou, Weize Quan, Sifei Li, Jingdong Chen, Dandan Zheng, Libin Wang, Weiming Dong (* equal contribution)
NeurIPS 2026Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems
COMPASS teaser
Ziqi Zhou, Weize Quan, Mining Tan, Zhihan Chen, Dandan Zheng, Jingdong Chen, Jun Zhou, Weiming Dong, Dong-Ming Yan
ECCV 2026European Conference on Computer Vision
GoHD teaser
Ziqi Zhou, Weize Quan, Hailin Shi, Wei Li, Lili Wang, Dong-Ming Yan
AAAI 2025AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Diffused Poses and Distilled Expressions teaser
Ziqi Zhou, Weize Quan, Zhaojin Lu, Dong-Ming Yan
ICASSP 2025IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing
ResGEM teaser
Ziqi Zhou, Mengke Yuan, Mingyang Zhao, Jianwei Guo, Dong-Ming Yan
TVCG 2024IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics

Experience

Academic Cooperative Researcher
Unified multimodal models for visual understanding and generation
May 2025 – Mar 2026
Research Intern
Self-supervised and vision-language representation learning for creative ranking
Mar 2024 – Jan 2025
Research Collaborator
Audio-driven digital humans for in-car assistants
Feb 2023 – Apr 2024