About me

I am a Researcher at INSAIT, working with Prof. Luc Van Gool and Dr. Danda Paudel. I received my MSc from ETH Zürich, where I conducted 3D Vision and Graphics research at Disney Research | Studios Zürich (with Prof. Markus Gross) and at VLG (with Prof. Siyu Tang). I obtained my Bachelor’s degree from City University of Hong Kong.

My research lies at the intersection of vision-language modeling, spatial AI, and controllable visual representations. I aim to build models that jointly reason about language and 3D environments, enabling fine-grained, controllable generation and editing of both 2D and 3D scene representations.

Research Interests

• Vision-Language Models & Multimodal Reasoning
• Spatial AI and 3D Scene Understanding
• Controllable 2D / 3D Generation & Editing
• Neural Rendering and Inverse Rendering

Outside research, I enjoy Rendering, Photography, video games, fingerstyle guitar, table tennis, skiing, and hiking.

News

Selected Publications

EgoNight: Towards Egocentric Vision Understanding at Night with a Challenging BenchmarkICLR 2026 Deheng Zhang*, Yuqian Fu*, Runyi Yang, Yang Miao, Tianwen Qian, Xu Zheng, Guolei Sun, Ajad Chhatkuli, Xuanjing Huang, Yu-Gang Jiang, Luc Van Gool, Danda Pani Paudel Paper Project Code Dataset The first comprehensive benchmark for egocentric vision understanding in low-light and nighttime conditions, comprising synthetic scenes (EgoNight-Synthetic), aligned day–night pairs (EgoNight-Sofia), and unaligned nighttime footage (EgoNight-Oxford).

StateSpaceDiffuser: Bringing Long Context to Diffusion World ModelsNeurIPS 2025 Nedko Savov, Naser Kazemi, Deheng Zhang, Danda Paudel, Xi Wang, Luc Van Gool Paper Project Code A diffusion world model that overcomes the memory bottleneck by integrating features from a state-space model representing the entire interaction history, enabling long-context world modeling.

RISE-SDF: a Relightable Information-Shared Signed Distance Field for Glossy Object Inverse Rendering3DV 2025 Deheng Zhang*, Jingyu Wang*, Shaofei Wang, Marko Mihajlovic, Sergey Prokudin, Hendrik P.A. Lensch, Siyu Tang Paper Project Code Dataset An end-to-end relightable neural inverse-rendering system enabling high-quality reconstruction of geometry and material properties. The core idea is a two-stage approach for better factorization of scene parameters, supporting high-quality relighting of glossy objects.

CoARF: Controllable 3D Artistic Style Transfer for Radiance Fields3DV 2024 Deheng Zhang, Clara Fernández Labrador, Christopher Schroers Paper Project A novel algorithm for controllable 3D scene stylization that enables style transfer for specified objects, compositional 3D style transfer, and semantic-aware style transfer via segmentation masks and label-dependent losses.

EgoSpot: Accessible Robot Control via Egocentric Multimodal SignalsICRA Workshop 2026 Ganlin Zhang*, Deheng Zhang*, Longteng Duan*, Guo Han*, Yuqian Fu, Danda Pani Paudel, Luc Van Gool, Eric Vollenweider (* equal contribution) Paper Project Code A mixed-reality system on HoloLens 2 that enables users to control the Boston Dynamics Spot robot through egocentric multimodal signals — gaze, gesture, and voice — making robot teleoperation more accessible and intuitive.

Selected Projects

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Point-Based Radiance Fields for Controllable Human Motion SynthesisCourse Project

Deheng Zhang*, Haitao Yu*, Peiyuan Xie*, Tianyi Zhang*

An animatable human avatar built on point-based primitives — static scene from Point-NeRF + deformation MLP + rotation-only ray-bending.

Paper Project Code

NICE-SLAM with Adaptive Feature GridsCourse Project

Deheng Zhang*, Ganlin Zhang*, Feichi Lu*, Anqi Li

A sparse version of NICE-SLAM bringing Voxel Hashing into the NICE-SLAM framework — surface-adaptive feature grids instead of dense initialization.

Paper Code

Kombu: Physically-based Renderer in C++11Course Project

Deheng Zhang*, Ganlin Zhang*

Heterogeneous volumetric rendering, bilateral-filter denoising, directional lights and instancing — culminating in our rendering-competition piece Christmas on the Moon.

Code Project

SAVA: Style-Attention-Void-Aware Style TransferBachelor Thesis

Deheng Zhang

A self-attention mechanism with explicit mathematical meaning and a style-transfer scheme that captures the blank-leaving structure of the style image.

Paper Code

OPUS: Particle Swarm Using Surrogates via Bunch-Kaufman PivotingCourse Project

Deheng Zhang*, Ganlin Zhang*, Junpeng Gao*, Yu Hong*

Speeding up OPUS black-box optimization with a fast C++ implementation of Bunch-Kaufman pivoting.

Paper Code

Point-Based Radiance Fields for Controllable Human Motion SynthesisCourse Project

Deheng Zhang*, Haitao Yu*, Peiyuan Xie*, Tianyi Zhang*

An animatable human avatar built on point-based primitives — static scene from Point-NeRF + deformation MLP + rotation-only ray-bending.

Paper Project Code

NICE-SLAM with Adaptive Feature GridsCourse Project

Deheng Zhang*, Ganlin Zhang*, Feichi Lu*, Anqi Li

A sparse version of NICE-SLAM bringing Voxel Hashing into the NICE-SLAM framework — surface-adaptive feature grids instead of dense initialization.

Paper Code

Kombu: Physically-based Renderer in C++11Course Project

Deheng Zhang*, Ganlin Zhang*

Heterogeneous volumetric rendering, bilateral-filter denoising, directional lights and instancing — culminating in our rendering-competition piece Christmas on the Moon.

Code Project

SAVA: Style-Attention-Void-Aware Style TransferBachelor Thesis

Deheng Zhang

A self-attention mechanism with explicit mathematical meaning and a style-transfer scheme that captures the blank-leaving structure of the style image.

Paper Code

OPUS: Particle Swarm Using Surrogates via Bunch-Kaufman PivotingCourse Project

Deheng Zhang*, Ganlin Zhang*, Junpeng Gao*, Yu Hong*

Speeding up OPUS black-box optimization with a fast C++ implementation of Bunch-Kaufman pivoting.

Paper Code

Experience

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Academic Services

• Conference Reviewer · ICML 2026 Gold Reviewer · NeurIPS 2026 · CVPR 2026
• Journal Reviewer · IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology (TCSVT)