About

Graduating June 2026. Open to full-time roles!

Hi! I'm Zheng, a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate at UC Santa Barbara, working with Prof. Lingqi Yan. I earned my Master's and Bachelor's degrees from Shandong University, working with Professors Lu Wang, Yanning Xu, and remotely with Prof. Beibei Wang.

I've interned at NVIDIA Applied Deep Learning Research group with Edward Liu; at Adobe with Miloš Hašan, Valentin Deschaintre, Iliyan Georgiev, Yannick Hold-Geoffroy, Yiwei Hu, and Fujun Luan; and at NVIDIA Real-time Rendering Research group with Daqi Lin, Markus Kettunen, Chris Wyman, Lifan Wu, and Ravi Ramamoorthi.

My research focuses on achieving real-time photorealic rendering, exploring new geometric representations, efficient sampling methods, aggregated complex appearance, dynamic global illumination solutions, software ray tracing solutions, and post-processing techniques. I also study emerging technologies to enhance real-time photorealic rendering.

Publications

RGB↔X: Image Decomposition and Synthesis Using Material- and Lighting-aware Diffusion Models
"You Can Let GenAI Models Eliminate/Simulate Global Illumination"
ACM SIGGRAPH 2024 (Conference Track)

Project Page Paper Code Slides Supplementary DOI arXiv


ExtraSS: A Framework for Joint Spatial Super Sampling and Frame Extrapolation
"You Can Jointly Upsample and Extrapolate Frames Within One Framework"
Songyin Wu, Sungye Kim, Zheng Zeng, Deepak Vembar, Sangeeta Jha, Anton Kaplanyan, Ling-Qi Yan
ACM SIGGRAPH Asia 2023 (Conference Track)

Project Page Paper Supplementary Supplemental video DOI


Ray-aligned Occupancy Map Array for Fast Approximate Ray Tracing
"You Can Voxelize Objects From Different Directions to Minimize Execution Divergence"
Computer Graphics Forum 2023 Top Viewed Article
Eurographics Symposium on Rendering 2023 (CGF track)

Project Page Paper Slides Supplemental video DOI Code (coming soon)


Lightweight Neural Basis Functions for All-Frequency Shading
"You Can Have Neural Basis Functions Act as Real Ones"
SIGGRAPH ASIA 2022

Project Page Paper Supplementary DOI


Temporally Reliable Motion Vectors for Better Use of Temporal Information
Zheng Zeng, Shiqiu (Edward) Liu, Jinglei Yang, Lu Wang, Ling-Qi Yan
Ray Tracing Gems II

Project Page


Temporally Reliable Motion Vectors for Real-time Ray Tracing
"You Can Design Different Motion Vectors for Different Effects to Better Utilize Temporal Information"
Zheng Zeng, Shiqiu (Edward) Liu, Jinglei Yang, Lu Wang, Ling-Qi Yan
Computer Graphics Forum (Proceedings of Eurographics 2021)

Project Page Paper Supplemental video DOI


Joint SVBRDF Recovery and Synthesis From a Single Image using an Unsupervised Generative Adversarial Network
"You Don't Need Corresponding SVBRDFs to Train a GAN to Generate SVBRDFs"
Eurographics Symposium on Rendering 2020

Project Page Paper Code DOI


Denoising Stochastic Progressive Photon Mapping Renderings Using a Multi-Residual Network
"You Need Different Receptive Fields for Different Scales of Noise"
Zheng Zeng, Lu Wang, Beibei Wang, Chun-Meng Kang, Yanning Xu
Journal of Computer Science and Technology (CVM2020)

Project Page Paper Slides DOI


Misc

I enjoy optimizing my research workflow. Tools I find useful:

  • Read papers, make sense of research, and develop intuition: Heptabase.
    • My path on note-taking system: NotionObsidianLogseqRoam ResearchHeptabase. Obsidian is a great and free alternative to Heptabase.
    • My personal opinion: note-taking is all about helping you
      • understand the knowledge in-place to reach the frontier,
      • notice the gaps between the fractals of knowledge,
      • explore and record the bad and good ideas, and
      • reuse the insights spatially (across different projects) and temporally (from past and for future).
  • Find related papers: Connected Papers, ResearchRabbit.

I collect research self-development resources in teach-yourself-research. Below are some highlights I’ve found extremely valuable - I’ve read them 3+ times and still revisit regularly:

Favorites:

Quotes:

  • “目指して欲しいのは、人が見ていたら努力だと思うけど、本人はそう思っていない状態。私にとっては普通の事なのに、なんか周りは評価してくれる、だったらすごくいい状態。” - 鈴木 一朗
  • “やってみて「ダメだ」と、わかった事とはじめから「ダメだ」と、言われたことは、違います。” - 鈴木 一朗
  • “世の中の大事なことって、たいてい面倒くさいんだよ。” - 宮崎駿
  • “Research is to see what everybody has seen and think what nobody has thought.” – Albert Szent-Györgyi paraphrasing Schopenhauer
  • “… It’s hard to do a really good job on anything you don’t think about in the shower.” - Paul Graham
  • “Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.” - Thomas Henry Huxley
  • “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” - Albert Einstein
  • “… A theoretical interpretation therefore had to be found at any cost, no matter how high.” - Max Planck
  • “Pressure is a privilege – it only comes to those who earn it.” - Billie Jean King