Zhiyuan Gao

Zhiyuan Gao

PhD Student@USC

University of Southern California

I am a PhD student in Computer Science at University of Southern California, advised by Prof. Jernej Barbic. I’ve finished my Master degree in CS@USC advised by Prof. Yue Wang and Prof. Jernej Barbic. I have also interned at Vision & Graphics Lab, where I was fortunate to work with Prof. Yajie Zhao.

Interests
  • Differentiable Simulation
  • Real-to-Sim
  • High Fidelity Digital Twin and Simulation
  • Robotics, Computer Graphics, 3D Computer Vision
Education

  • PhD in Computer Science, 2025-

    University of Southern California

  • M.S. in Computer Science, 2023-2025

    University of Southern California

News
  •    [2025-10] One paper is accepted to NeurIPS 2025!
  •    [2025-07] One paper is accepted to ICCV 2025!
  •    [2024-12] One paper is accepted as Oral Presentation to 3DV 2025!
  •    [2024-09] One paper is accepted to WACV 2025!

Publications

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Selected Publications All
Seeing the Wind from a Falling Leaf

Seeing the Wind from a Falling Leaf

Zhiyuan Gao, Jiageng Mao, Hong-Xing Yu, Haozhe Lou, Emily Yue-ting Jia, Jernej Barbic, Jiajun Wu, Yue Wang
NeurIPS 2025
Differentiable pipeline that recovers wind forces from leaf videos and enables physics-consistent video editing and wind manipulation.
arXiv Cite OpenReview Website
Skyeyes: Ground Roaming using Aerial View Images

Skyeyes: Ground Roaming using Aerial View Images

Zhiyuan Gao, Wenbin Teng, Gonglin Chen, Jinsen Wu, Ningli Xu, Rongjun Qin, Andrew Feng, Yajie Zhao
WACV 2025
Skyeyes is a framework that can generate photorealistic sequences of ground view images using only aerial view inputs, thereby creating a ground roaming experience.
arXiv Cite Website

Experience

 
 
 
 
 
USC Geometry, Vision, and Learning Lab
Research Intern
USC Geometry, Vision, and Learning Lab
May 2024 – May 2025 Los Angeles, Califronia
Research on differentiable simulation for scene reconstruction and video generation; resulted in a NeurIPS’25 paper and an ICCV’25 paper.
 
 
 
 
 
USC ICT Vision & Graphics Group
Research Intern
USC ICT Vision & Graphics Group
June 2023 – September 2024 Los Angeles, Califronia
Research on urban scence reconstruction and generation based on aerial imagery, which resulted in a WACV'25 paper and a 3DV'25 paper.
 
 
 
 
 
Shanghai Research Institute for Intelligent Autonomous Systems
Research Intern
Shanghai Research Institute for Intelligent Autonomous Systems
September 2020 – March 2022 Shanghai, China
Worked on computer vision for structural health monitoring; led to papers in Eng. Appl. AI, CA-CIE, and SSS.
 
 
 
 
 
Tongji-MIT City Science Lab
Research Intern
Tongji-MIT City Science Lab
October 2020 – October 2021 Shanghai, China
Developed pedestrian trajectory analysis and mined patterns; led to the Environment and Planning B paper on street-level urban vibrancy.

Fun Facts

  • My Erdős number is 3: Zhiyuan Gao → Jitendra Malik → Fan Chung Graham → Paul Erdős.

  • I built phdstat, a tool for visualizing grad school application data from TheGradCafe with near real-time updates. It has helped 1k+ applicants track their applications. If you’re interested in contributing to this project, feel free to contact me.

  • I've contributed to several games (click to expand)
    Flappy Balloon trailer frame
    Flappy Balloon
    Alt-controller party game guiding a balloon through obstacles with custom inputs.
    I was one of the producers.
    PL-23 teaser
    PL-23
    AI-driven detective/puzzle game in the spirit of story-rich investigation titles.
    I am the lead producer and a past backend engineer.
    Trailer: coming soon.

Contact