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                      Xiyi Chen
                     I am a second-year PhD student in Computer Science at the University of Maryland, College Park, advised by Prof. Ming Lin.
                     
                      Before that, I obtained my master's degree in Computer Science at ETH Zürich, where I worked on human avatar synthesis and human mesh recovery, advised by Dr. Sergey Prokudin and Prof. Siyu Tang. I obtained my bachelor's degree in Computer Science also at Maryland. Back then, I worked with Prof. David Jacobs on surveillance-quality face recognition.
                     
                      My research interests lie at the intersection of computer vision and computer graphics, with a focus on reconstructing high-fidelity human avatars from single or sparse views. More broadly, I am also interested in scene reconstruction, particularly leveraging Gaussian Splatting–based methods.
                     I am actively looking for internship opportunities for summer 2026. Please feel free to reach out if you think I could be a good fit to your team! 
                      Email  / 
                      Github  / 
                      Google Scholar  / 
                      LinkedIn  / 
                      Gallery
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                  | News
                       08/2024 I start as a PhD student at the University of Maryland, College Park.  02/2024 Our work Morphable Diffusion is accepted to CVPR 2024!  |  
              
                
                  |  | Towards Robust 3D Body Mesh Inference of Partially-observed Humans Semester Project at Computer Vision and Learning Group
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                      We improved SMPLify-X optimization pipeline by applying keypoints blending and a stronger pose prior for robust human mesh inference on partially-observed human images.
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                  |  | Leveraging Motion Imitation in Reinforcement Learning for Biped Character Final project for Digital Humans
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                      We reproduced the imitation tasks in Deepmimic with a curriculum training strategy to extend our algorithm’s applicability to various biped robots with different shapes, masses, and dynamics models.
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                  |  | Learning to Reconstruct 3D Faces by Watching TV Final project for 3D Vision
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                      We proposed to use the abundant temporal information from TV series videos for 3D face reconstruction, by modifying DECA's encoders and include bidirectional RNN based temporal feature extractors to propagate and aggregate temporal information across frames.
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                  |  | Gentrification Exploration in Zürich Final Project for Interactive Machine Learning: Visualization & Explainability
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                      We designed an interactive machine learning tool with Variational Nearest Neighbor Gaussian Process (VNNGP) model to uncover and visualize pricing dynamics and gentrification developments in the housing rental market of Zürich.
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                  | Services
                      Journal Reviewer: TPAMI, TETCConference Reviewer: NeurIPS, ICLR |  
              
                
                  | Awards
                      NeurIPS Top Reviewer (2025)Dean’s Fellowship, University of Maryland (2024) |  |