Jieneng Chen

I'm a final-year Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University, advised by Distinguished Professor Alan L. Yuille. I am awarded as a Siebel Scholar Class 2025.

I am on the job market for 2025! Would love to chat more if you are interested. I am very happy to give talks on my research in related seminars.


               

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My research explores the computational roots of intelligence, guided by three pillars: the bitter lesson, the physical world, and human/biological evolution. Ever since my undergraduate visit to Hopkins, I’ve been advancing biomedical intelligence. More recently, I strive to amplify the intelligence through generative world modeling.
News
  • I gave an invited talk at ICLR Workshop on Embodied Intelligence with Large Language Models In Open City Environment (slides).
  • I gave an invited talk at Cognitive Science Brown Bag Talk at JHU.
  • Awarded an NVIDIA Academic Grant.
  • I am co-organizing CVPR'25 workshop on Generative Models for Computer Vision.
  • Genex will be presented at ICLR'25 and CVPR'25 Demo. Congrats to the undergraduate TaiMing for winning the Michael J. Muuss Research Award!
  • Selected as a Siebel Scholar, acknowledging me as a leading PhD student in bioengineering at JHU, as well as globally.
  • TransUNet is listed as top 15 cited 2021 paper in all AI fields (the top 1 alphafold has won the nobel prize).
  • SwinUNet is listed as top 3 most cited ECCV papers in five years in Google Metrics.
    • Recent Publications

    Full list on Google Scholar Profile (over 13,000 citations).


    GenEx: Generating an Explorable World.
    TaiMing Lu, Tianmin Shu, Alan Yuille, Daniel Khashabi, Jieneng Chen.

    ICLR, 2025.
    Turn a single image into a 3D world adventure. Discover the magic within.
    OpenReview | Blog | Project



    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.



    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 | Code | HuggingFace Data Card



    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


    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 GitHub Stars Badge | open_clip GitHub Stars Badge


    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 | GitHub Stars Badge
    Top ScienceDirect downloaded article 🏆, published all time.
    Top 15 cited 2021 paper in all AI fields, 6000 citations.


    Teaching and Mentoring
    • Instructor: I designed and taught the undergraduate course Machine Imagination at JHU in 2025.
    • Serving: I am on the invited reviewers and program committees for major conference and journals, such as CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, AAAI, TPAMI, TMI, MICCAI and CogSci. I co-organized workshops on CVPR and MICCAI.
    • Mentoring: I am fortunate to have mentored super talented undergraduate, master and visiting students at JHU (and some from underrepresentative groups). Several from the 2024 cohort have gone on to pursue top CS PhD programs at institutions including CMU, JHU, Princeton, Northwestern and Oxford.