Jieneng Chen I'm a final-year Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University, advised by Prof. Alan L. Yuille and Prof. Rama Chellappa. I am also named a Siebel Scholar, the highest distinction for Ph.D in Bioengineering at JHU. I'm best known for my neural architecture TransUNet, with over 8,000 citations. My research seeks to bridge the gap between artificial and natural intelligence by building spatially structured world models that enable next-generation reasoning and interaction, with applications spanning computer vision, embodied AI, physical science, and healthcare.

• Siebel Scholar Award, Class 2025.
• MICCAI 2025 Best Paper Award Runner-Up (top 0.1%).
• MICCAI 2025 Doctoral Thesis Runner-Up Award.
• KDD 2025 CCC Best Paper Award.
• NVIDIA 2025 Academic Grant Award.
• NSF Travel Award, CVPR 2025 Doctoral Consortium.
• CVPR 2025 Highlights (top 3%).
• 2025 Visionary Award, LLM for Material Science.
• Mentored undergraduate won Michael J. Muuss Research Award and CRA Outstanding Award Finalist. Congrats, TaiMing!

Full list on Google Scholar Profile . ☆ denotes visiting undergraduate / graduate mentees.

	GenEx: Generating an Explorable World. TaiMing Lu ☆, Tianmin Shu, Alan Yuille, Daniel Khashabi, Jieneng Chen. ICLR, 2025 CVPR (Demo Track), 2025 Turn a single image into a 3D world adventure. Embodied agents refine their beliefs by predicting unseen parts of the physical world. Paper (OpenReview) | Blog | Project Website
	Medical World Model: Generative Simulation of Tumor Evolution for Treatment Planning. Yijun Yang ☆, Zhao-Yang Wang, Qiuping Liu, Shuwen Sun, Kang Wang, Rama Chellappa, Zongwei Zhou, Alan Yuille, Lei Zhu, Yu-Dong Zhang, Jieneng Chen. ICCV, 2025. Envision precision medicine via generative world modeling. Paper | Code | Project
	EvoWorld: Evolving Panoramic World Generation with Explicit 3D Memory. Jiahao Wang*, Luoxin Ye*, TaiMing Lu, Junfei Xiao, Jiahan Zhang, Yuxiang Guo, Xijun Liu, Rama Chellappa, Cheng Peng, Alan Yuille, Jieneng Chen. Technical report, 2025. Bridge generative world models with 3D vision. Paper | Code
	4D-Animal: Freely Reconstructing Animatable 3D Animals from Videos. Shanshan Zhong ☆, Jiawei Peng, Zehan Zheng, Zhongzhan Huang, Wufei Ma, Guofeng Zhang, Qihao Liu, Alan Yuille, Jieneng Chen, 🐕 🐴 Technical report, 2025. Paper | Code
	Vision-Language-Vision Auto-Encoder: Scalable Knowledge Distillation from Diffusion Models. Tiezheng Zhang, Yitong Li, Yu-Cheng Chou, Jieneng Chen, Alan Yuille, Chen Wei, Junfei Xiao. NeurIPS, 2025. Paper | Project | Code | HuggingFace Data Card
	Spatial457: A Diagnostic Benchmark for 6D Spatial Reasoning of Large Multimodal Models. Xingrui Wang, Wufei Ma, Tiezheng Zhang, Celso Miguel de Melo, Jieneng Chen†, Alan Yuille†. CVPR, Highlight, 2025. Paper camera ready | Code | HuggingFace Data Card
	SpatialLLM: A Compound 3D-Informed Design towards Spatially-Intelligent Large Multimodal Models. Wufei Ma, Luoxin Ye, Nessa McWeeney, Celso Miguel de Melo, Alan Yuille, Jieneng Chen. CVPR, Highlight, 2025. Paper camera ready
	LLaVolta: Efficient Large Multi-modal Models via Visual Context Compression. Jieneng Chen, Luoxin Ye, Ju He, Zhaoyang Wang, Daniel Khashabi, Alan Yuille. NeurIPS, 2024. Paper | Code | Project
	ViTamin: Designing Scalable Vision Models in the Vision-Language Era. Jieneng Chen, Qihang Yu, Xiaohui Shen, Alan Yuille, Liang-Chieh Chen. CVPR, 2024. The first vision-centric design for LMM encoder, with SoTA performance on 60+ multimodal tasks in 2024. Paper | Code | 🤗 HuggingFace | timm | open_clip
	TransUNet: Rethinking the U-Net Architecture Design for Medical Image Segmentation through the Lens of Transformers. Jieneng Chen, Jieru Mei, Xianhang Li, Yongyi Lu, Qihang Yu, Qingyue Wei, Xiangde Luo, Yutong Xie, Ehsan Adeli, Yan Wang, Matthew P Lungren, Shaoting Zhang, Lei Xing, Le Lu, Alan Yuille, Yuyin Zhou. Medical Image Analysis (MedIA), 2024. ICML-W 2021 | Journal | Code | Top ScienceDirect downloaded article 🏆, published all time. Top 15 cited 2021 paper in all AI fields, 6000 citations.

• invited talk at NSF IAIFI on physics & AI in Boston.
• invited lab seminar at Stanford.
• invited vision seminar at UIUC.
• invited lab seminars at Harvard/MIT/HMS/MGH/Dana-Farber.
• invited talk at ICLR 2025 Workshop on Embodied Intelligence with LLMs In Open City Environment (slides).
• invited talks at Johns Hopkins, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering (ChemBE), Cognitive Science Brown Bag, Center for Language and Speech Processing (CLSP), Mathematical Institute for Data Science (MINDS), Artificial Intelligence for Engineering and Medicine Lab (AIEM).

• Instructor: I designed and taught the undergraduate course Machine Imagination, EN.601.208, at JHU in 2025.

• Invited reviewers: CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, WACV, NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, AAAI, IJCV, TPAMI, TMI, MICCAI and CogSci.
• Workshop co-organizer for CVPR and MICCAI.

I am fortunate to have collaborated with super talented students at JHU.

• TaiMing Lu, JHU Undergraduate → Princeton CS PhD
  Michael J. Muuss Research Award and finalist for the CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award.
• Shanshan Zhong, SYSU MS → CMU LTI PhD