Jieneng Chen jchen293 [at] jh.edu I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University in March 2026, advised by Alan L. Yuille and Rama Chellappa. I will spend my spring and summer at Stanford CS as a postdoc. I study intelligence in the physical world by structuring raw observations into spatial code. My prior work laid the foundation, spanning scalable vision encoders and world models. I am best known for TransUNet, which unifies local and global context and has over 10,000 citations. I am a Siebel Scholar for contributions to bioengineering, a Harvard Kempner Fellow, and a recipient of several best paper and young investigator awards. Email · CV · Scholar · Github · LinkedIn

• Upcoming talks at UCSD and UVA in March 2026.
• Prospective interns: Email me about the CCVL Internship Program.
• New paper: Thinking with Spatial Code — new SoTA on VSI-bench for 3D/4D reasoning.
• New paper: CausalSpatial — benchmark and causal world model for 4D + physics reasoning.
• Co-organizing the 1st CVPR 2026 workshop on World Models Meet Active Sensing and Embodied Planning. Try our benchmark World-in-World (ICLR 2026 Oral).
• Co-organizing the 4th CVPR 2026 workshop on Generative Models for Computer Vision.

• Siebel Scholar Award, class 2025 ($35k)
• MICCAI 2025 Doctoral Thesis Award
• MICCAI 2025 Best Paper Award runner-up (2 / 1,027 accepted papers)
• Young Investigator Best Paper Award — KDD Health Day, CCC, and NIH
• Visionary Award, AI for Material Science
• NSF Travel Award, CVPR Doctoral Consortium
• PhD Thesis Completion Award, JHU Provost ($32k)
• RSNA 2025 Certificate of Merit (16 / 1,951)
• DAAD AInet Fellowship
• Kempner Research Fellowship, Harvard (up to $300k)
• NVIDIA 2025 Academic Grant ($100k compute)
• #1 most downloaded article on ScienceDirect; among the most cited in MedIA
• #1 most cited among all ECCV publications in past five years (Google Metrics)

• Mentee's paper selected for Oral at ICLR 2026 (top 1% of submissions). Congrats, Jiahan!
• Undergraduate mentee finalist (1 of 24) for CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award. Congrats, TaiMing!
• Undergraduate mentee wins Provost's Undergraduate Research Award ($6k). Congrats, Arda!
• Undergraduate mentee received Honorable Mention for Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award. Congrats, Arda!
• Undergraduate mentee won Michael J. Muuss Research Award. Congrats, TaiMing!

Publications from the past two years. Full list on Google Scholar.

Research Highlights

ICLR'26 Oral

World-in-World

Closed-loop world model — generation, perception & action in the physical world.

ICLR'25

GenEx

Turn a single image into an explorable 3D world. Agents navigate generated environments.

arXiv'26

CausalSpatial

Object-centric causal spatial reasoning benchmark with physics-aware world model evaluation.

ICCV'25

MeWM

Medical World Model — generative tumor evolution simulation for personalised treatment planning.

CVPR'25 Highlight

SpatialLLM

Compound 3D-informed design for spatially-intelligent large multimodal models.

ICLR'26 Oral

World-in-World

Closed-loop world model — generation, perception & action in the physical world.

ICLR '25

GenEx

Turn a single image into an explorable 3D world. Agents navigate generated environments.

ICLR'26 WM

CausalSpatial

Object-centric causal spatial reasoning benchmark with physics-aware world model evaluation.

ICCV '25

MeWM

Medical World Model — generative tumor evolution simulation for personalised treatment planning.

CVPR'25 Highlight

SpatialLLM

Compound 3D-informed design for spatially-intelligent large multimodal models.

WACV '26

4D-Animal

Freely reconstructing animatable 3D animals from monocular video.

	World-in-World: World Models in a Closed-Loop World Jiahan Zhang*, Muqing Jiang*, Nanru Dai, TaiMing Lu, Arda Uzunoglu, Shunchi Zhang, Yana Wei, Jiahao Wang, Vishal Patel, Paul Liang, Daniel Khashabi, Cheng Peng, Rama Chellappa, Tianmin Shu, Alan Yuille, Yilun Du, Jieneng Chen. ICLR, 2026. Oral (1%). World models live and die by their closed-loop success, not flawless generated visuals. Paper | OpenReview | Project | Leaderboard | Demo | Code
	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. Embodied agents refine beliefs by predicting unseen parts of the physical world. JHU News | Paper | Blog | Project | Code
	CausalSpatial: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Object-Centric Causal Spatial Reasoning Wenxin Ma*, Chenlong Wang*, Ruisheng Yuan*, Hao Chen, Nanru Dai, S. Kevin Zhou, Yijun Yang, Alan Yuille, Jieneng Chen. ICLR Workshop on World Models, 2026. A benchmark and early causal world model for grounded causal reasoning in space. Paper | HuggingFace Dataset
	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. ICLR Workshop on World Models, 2026. Bridge generative world models with 3D vision. Paper | Code
	Fast Generative DeOcclusion for Visual Geometry and Robotics Jieneng Chen et al. CVPR, Findings, 2026. [Coming soon]
	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. Precision medicine via generative world modeling. Paper | Code | Project
	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, 2025. Highlight. Paper | Code | HuggingFace
	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, 2025. Highlight. Paper
	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. WACV, 2026. Paper | Code
	VM-Gait: Multi-Modal 3D Representation Based on Virtual Marker for Gait Recognition Zhao-Yang Wang, Jiang Liu, Jieneng Chen*, Rama Chellappa*. WACV, 2025. Paper
	ViTamin: Designing Scalable Vision Models in the Vision-Language Era Jieneng Chen, Qihang Yu, Xiaohui Shen, Alan Yuille, Liang-Chieh Chen. CVPR, 2024. First vision-centric encoder design for LMMs; SoTA on 60+ benchmarks in 2024. Paper | Code | HuggingFace | timm | open_clip
	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
	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, Oct 2024. Top-15 cited 2021 paper in all AI fields. Most downloaded on ScienceDirect. Most cited in MedIA. ICML-W 2021 | Journal | Code

• Invited talk at NSF IAIFI on physics & AI, Boston.
• Lab seminar at Stanford.
• Vision seminar at UIUC.
• Guest lecture at Rice University.
• Lab seminars at Harvard / MIT / HMS / MGH / Dana-Farber.
• Talk at ICLR 2025 Workshop on Embodied Intelligence with LLMs in Open City Environment (slides).
• Talks at JHU: ChemBE, Cognitive Science, CLSP, MINDS, AIEM.

• Instructor: Machine Imagination (EN.601.208), JHU, 2025 & 2026.

• Reviewer: CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, WACV, NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, AAAI, IJCV, TPAMI, TMI, MICCAI, CogSci.
• Workshop co-organizer: ICCV, CVPR, MICCAI.
• JHU CS mentor hours.
• Lecture for JHU WSE Pre-College Program 2025.

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

• TaiMing Lu, JHU Undergraduate → Princeton CS PhD
  1 first-author ICLR publication (GenEx). Michael J. Muuss Research Award; finalist for CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award.
• Shanshan Zhong, SYSU MS → CMU LTI PhD
  1 first-author WACV publication (4D-Animal).

My doctoral research was made possible through the generous support of ARL, IARPA, NSF, NIH, ONR, Lambda, NVIDIA, Johns Hopkins University, the Siebel Foundation, the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, and the Lustgarten Foundation.