Zhongzheng (Jason) Ren
PhD Student (ABD)
Department of Computer Science
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC)
Email: zr5 [at] illinois [dot] edu
GitHub / CV / Google Scholar / LinkedIn

I am a last year PhD student in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). I'm advised by Alex Schwing and closely collaborate with Shenlong Wang. Previously, I obtained Master's in Computer Science from UC Davis after spending two wonderful years with Yong Jae Lee. I completed Bachelor of Software Engineering at Sun Yat-sen University (中山大学).

I am very fortunate to have spent summer 2021 and 2022 at Adobe Research with Aseem Agarwala, Bryan Russell, and Oliver Wang; summer 2020 at Facebook AI Research (FAIR) with Rohit Girdhar and Ishan Misra; summer 2018 and 2019 at NVIDIA Research with Zhiding Yu, Xiaodong Yang, Ming-Yu Liu, and Jan Kautz. I worked as machine learning researcher at EgoVid with Michael S. Ryoo in 2017.

My research wouldn't be possible without support made by Yee Memorial Fund Fellowship, Yunni & Maxine Pao Memorial Fellowship, Amazon AWS, UC Davis, and UIUC. Thanks so much!

Research Interests: Computer Vision, Graphics, Machine Learning.
I am particularly interested in 4D (3D+time) vision and visual learning from limited labeled data.

To undergrad/MS/junior PhD students: if you'd like to chat about topics (eg., research/career/anything) related to CV/ML, feel free to reach out! I'm more than happy to chat and dedicate 1~2 30 mins slots each week for such meetings. Priority goes to the students from underrepresented groups in STEM.

News

  • I'm on job market and looking for a research scientist or post-doc position. Feel free to reach out!
  • One paper is accepted into AAAI 2023 on human reconstruction. Me and my dog Loki is featured!
  • One paper is accepted into NeurIPS 2022 on animal reconstruction.
  • Two papers are accepted into CVPR 2022 on 3D object selection and neural TV-optimization layer.
  • Publications (*: equal contribution, : alphabetic ordering)

    Occupancy Planes for Single-view RGB-D Human Reconstruction
    Xiaoming Zhao, Yuan-Ting Hu, Zhongzheng Ren, Alexander G. Schwing
    AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2023
    PDF | BIBTEX | Project
    In case you're wondering: Yes! That's me and my dog Loki :)
    CASA: Category-agnostic Skeletal Animal Reconstruction
    Yuefan Wu*, Zeyuan Chen*, Shaowei Liu, Zhongzheng Ren, Shenlong Wang
    Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2022
    PDF | BIBTEX | Project
    Neural Volumetric Object Selection
    Zhongzheng Ren, Aseem Agarwala, Bryan Russell, Alexander G. Schwing,
    Oliver Wang

    IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2022
    PDF | BIBTEX | Project
    Also presented at AI for Content Creation Workshop (AI4CC) and
    Computer Vision for AR/VR workshop (CV4ARVR) at CVPR'22
    Total Variation Optimization Layers for Computer Vision
    Raymond A. Yeh, Yuan-Ting Hu, Zhongzheng Ren, Alexander G. Schwing
    IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2022
    PDF | BIBTEX | Project
    Class-agnostic Reconstruction of Dynamic Objects from Videos
    Zhongzheng Ren*, Xiaoming Zhao*, Alexander G. Schwing
    Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2021
    PDF | BIBTEX | Project
    Semantic Tracklets: An Object-Centric Representation for Visual
    Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

    Iou-Jen Liu*, Zhongzheng Ren*, Raymond A. Yeh*, Alexander G. Schwing
    IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2021
    PDF | BIBTEX | Project
    Also presented at ICML'21 Reinforcement Learning for Real Life Workshop
    3D Spatial Recognition without Spatially Labeled 3D
    Zhongzheng Ren, Ishan Misra, Alexander G. Schwing, Rohit Girdhar
    IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021
    PDF | BIBTEX | Project
    Not All Unlabeled Data are Equal: Learning to Weight Data in Semi-supervised Learning
    Zhongzheng Ren*, Raymond A. Yeh*, Alexander G. Schwing
    Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2020
    PDF | BIBTEX | Project
    UFO2: A Unified Framework towards Omni-supervised Object Detection
    Zhongzheng Ren, Zhiding Yu, Xiaodong Yang, Ming-Yu Liu, Alexander G. Schwing, Jan Kautz
    European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020
    PDF | BIBTEX | Project
    Instance-aware, Context-focused, and Memory-efficient Weakly Supervised Object Detection
    Zhongzheng Ren, Zhiding Yu, Xiaodong Yang, Ming-Yu Liu, Yong Jae Lee,
    Alexander G. Schwing, Jan Kautz

    IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020
    PDF | BIBTEX | Project
    Also presented at CVPR'20 Visual Learning with Limited Labels Workshop
    Learning to Anonymize Faces for Privacy Preserving Action Detection
    Zhongzheng Ren, Yong Jae Lee, Michael S. Ryoo
    European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018
    PDF | BIBTEX | Project
    Also presented at CVPR'18 workshop on The Bright and Dark Sides of Computer Vision: Challenges and Opportunities for Privacy and Security
    Cross-Domain Self-supervised Multi-task Feature Learning using Synthetic Imagery
    Zhongzheng Ren, Yong Jae Lee
    IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2018
    PDF | BIBTEX | Project
    Who moved my cheese? Automatic Annotation of Rodent Behaviors with Convolutional Neural Networks
    Zhongzheng Ren, Adriana Noronha, Annie Vogel Ciernia, Yong Jae Lee
    IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2017
    PDF | BIBTEX | Project

    Teaching

    We (mostly Alex) developed an efficient tool PDFCrop for creating Compass/Blackboard online exam from pdf files. Check out this demo video and reach out if you need access!

  • CS 446/ECE 449: Machine Learning (Spring 2023), UIUC
    Teaching Assistant (TA) with Matus Telgarsky and Zhizhen Zhao
  • CS 446/ECE 449: Machine Learning (Spring 2022), UIUC
    Teaching Assistant (TA) with Matus Telgarsky and Alex Schwing
  • ECE 544: Pattern Recognition (Fall 2020), UIUC
    Teaching Assistant (TA) with Alex Schwing
  • CS 446/ECE 449: Machine Learning (Spring 2020), UIUC
    Teaching Assistant (TA) with Alex Schwing
  • ECS 174: Computer Vision (Spring 2017), UC Davis
    Teaching Assistant (TA) with Yong Jae Lee
  • Misc.

  • My Chinese name is 任中正.
  • I maintain awesome-self-supervised-learning on Github. You are more than welcome to contribute and share :)
  • My Erdős number is 4 computed by csauthors.net. Try yours:)
    Paul Erdős -> Ronald L. Graham -> Chung-Kuan Cheng -> Xiaodong Yang -> Zhongzheng Ren.