Zhongzheng (Jason) Ren

jasonren AT uw.edu

jasonren AT cs.unc.edu

I’m a research scientist at the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2). I’m also a postdoctoral researcher at the RAIVN Lab, University of Washington hosted by Ranjay Krishna and Ali Farhadi. Previously, I was a research scientist at Apple. During my graduate studies, I have interned at Apple, Adobe, Meta, and NVIDIA.

I received my Ph.D in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), advised by Alexander Schwing and closely collaborated with Shenlong Wang. I received my M.Sc from UC Davis advised by Yong Jae Lee, and B.Eng from Sun Yat-sen University.

My research focuses on computer vision, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. I am particularly interested in multimodal generation and understanding, with a focus on how AI systems comprehend and engage with complex real-world environments.

My Chinese name is 任中正.

🚀 I will be joining the Computer Science department at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) in Fall 2026 as an Assistant Professor. I am looking for motivated students at all levels to join my lab — see information about my lab here.

📢 For UW students: I'm seeking motivated undergrad and MS students for research opportunities. Topics are generally flexible, with a slight preference for visual generation, 3D vision, and VLMs. Feel free to send me an email with your CV and transcripts.

News

May 01, 2026	Molmo2 has been accepted into CVPR 2026 as oral presentation (top 0.7% of submissions). We’ve released everything: tech report, online demo, full data, pre-trained models, and code.
Apr 07, 2026	Introducing WildDet3D – open 3D detector for objects in-the-wild! We are excited to release the tech report, online demo, data, benchmark, pre-trained models, code, and Iphone App.
Mar 28, 2026	Thrilled to introduce VFig: a powerful Img-to-SVG VLM and MolmoWeb: an open agent for automating web tasks.
Feb 24, 2026	TOPReward is out where we introduce a training-free reward model for robotics.