Zhongzheng (Jason) Ren
jasonren AT cs.unc.edu
Department of Computer Science
Room FB 240
201 S Columbia St
Chapel Hill, NC 27599
I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), and a Research Scientist at the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2).
Previously, I was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Washington (2025–2026), where I worked in the RAIVN Lab with Ranjay Krishna and Ali Farhadi. Before that, I was a Research Scientist at Apple (2023–2025). During my graduate studies, I interned at Apple, Adobe, Meta, and NVIDIA.
I completed my Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in 2023, advised by Alexander Schwing and collaborating closely with Shenlong Wang. I received my M.Sc. from UC Davis (2017), advised by Yong Jae Lee, and my B.Eng. from Sun Yat-sen University in 2015.
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.
News
- Aug 16, 2026 I’m teaching COMP 690: Deep Generative Models at UNC-Chapel Hill this Fall 2026, covering the theory and applications behind modern image, video, 3D, action, and language generation systems. If you’re a UNC student interested in generative modeling, please register!
- Jun 17, 2026 Introducing MolmoMotion – 3D point trajectories forecasting model from language instruction! We are excited to release the paper, data, benchmark, pre-trained models, code.
- Jun 17, 2026 MolmoWeb – open visual web agent for automating browser tasks – is accepted to ECCV 2026! Check out the paper, data, pre-trained models, code, demo.
- Jun 07, 2026 RefDecoder received the 🏆 Best Paper Award at the AI for Content Creation (AICC) Workshop @ CVPR 2026!
- May 05, 2026 Thrilled to introduce MolmoAct2 – an open foundation for robots that work in the real world! We are excited to release the tech report, data, pre-trained models, code.
- Apr 08, 2026 Molmo2 has been accepted into CVPR 2026 as oral presentation (top 0.7% of submissions) and received the 🏆 Best Paper Award Candidate and 🏆 CVPR Compute Transparency Champion Award! 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.