About
Graduating June 2026. Open to full-time roles!
Hi! I'm Zheng, a final-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 Graphics Lab with Daqi Lin, Markus Kettunen, Chris Wyman, Lifan Wu, and Ravi Ramamoorthi.
My research focuses on achieving real-time photorealistic rendering, exploring:
- New geometric representations, efficient sampling methods
- Efficient sampling methods, aggregated complex appearance
- Software ray tracing solutions, and post-processing techniques
I also study generative diffusion models for real-time photorealistic rendering and inverse rendering, focusing on:
- Creating content with infinite detail — and when it's necessary
- Efficient storage, streaming, and use of such content
- Distilling generative model priors to skip the uncanny valley
- Leveraging inductive bias in interactive 3D graphics
Publications
Two more SIGGRAPH Asia 2025 papers to appear ...
Project Page Paper Slides Supplemental video DOI Code (coming soon)
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: Notion → Obsidian → Logseq → Roam Research → Heptabase. 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:
- The Importance of Deconstruction - Kilian Q. Weinberger
- The Craft of Writing Effectively - Larry McEnerney
- Principles of Effective Research - Michael A. Nielsen
Favorites:
- Songs from 家入レオ (推し), Official Hige Dandism, Back Number, Milet, Creepy Nuts, Tokyo Jihen, Laika, m-flo, Hitsujibungaku
- Manzai (漫才): from Non style, 令和ロマン, Sandwichman, Miki, Knights, Tom Brown
- Films, Video games, Anime, Tokusatsu (特撮), Manga, Photography.
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
- “Pressure is a privilege – it only comes to those who earn it.” - Billie Jean King