Biography

I am a Student Researcher on the Gemini Team at Google DeepMind, working on multimodal agentic search and orchestration for the Gemini model family. I am also a first-year PhD student at Rutgers University - New Brunswick, advised by Prof. Chengzhi Mao. My research studies latent-space reasoning in multimodal foundation models, with a focus on search, parallel reasoning, and 3D/spatial understanding.

I am particularly interested in when continuous internal representations can support visual and geometric reasoning better than text-only reasoning traces.

Before my PhD, I worked on generative AI for 3D vision, spanning generation, inverse rendering, and geometric reconstruction. I interned at Tencent LightSpeed Studio, Microsoft Research Asia, and SmartMore, working closely with Jinglu Wang, Shuai Yang, and Jinnan Chen.

I received my M.Phil. in Artificial Intelligence from HKUST, advised by Prof. Yingcong Chen and Prof. Dan Xu, and my B.S. in Mathematics from Sun Yat-sen University.

News

• • 2025.12: We announced UltraShape 1.0, an open-source Large 3D Shape Generation Model. Technical Report and Code are available on the project page.
• • 2025.3: I started my research intern at Tencent LIGHTSPEED STUDIOS, working on Large 3D Models. Collaborations are highly welcomed.
• • 2024.12: I am looking for PhD position in 2025. Please contact me if you are interested.

Experience

1. 

   Jun 2026 — Present

   Google DeepMind

   Student Researcher · Gemini Team · New York, NY, US

   Working on searching agent orchestration.

2. 

   Mar 2025 — Sep 2025

   Tencent IEG

   Research Intern · LightSpeed Studios Research · Shenzhen, CN

   Working on Large 3D Models for game asset generation.

3. 

   Jun 2024 — Feb 2025

   Microsoft Research Asia Stars of Tomorrow

   Research Intern · Media Computing Group · Beijing, CN

   Worked on generalizable 3D Gaussian Splatting from unposed videos.

4. 

   Jun 2022 — May 2024

   SmartMore

   Research Intern · Optical Imaging Research Group · Shenzhen, CN

   Worked on neural 3D reconstruction with polarization cues.

5. 

   Mar 2021 — Nov 2021

   Sun Yat-sen University

   Research Assistant · BME AI Lab · Guangzhou, CN

   Worked on biomedical image segmentation.

Publications [Google Scholar]

*: Equal Contribution

Arxiv 2026

LACE: Lattice Attention for Cross-thread Exploration

Yang Li, Zirui Zhang, Yang Liu, Chengzhi Mao

Preprint. arXiv:2604.15529. 2026

Paper

IROS 2026

APPLV: Adaptive Planner Parameter Learning from Vision-Language-Action Model

Yuanjie Lu, Beichen Wang, Zhengqi Wu, Yang Li, Xiaomin Lin, Chengzhi Mao, Xuesu Xiao

IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS). 2026

Paper

Tech Report

UltraShape 1.0: High-Fidelity 3D Shape Generation via Scalable Geometric Refinement

Tanghui Jia, Dongyu Yan, Dehao Hao, Yang Li, Kaiyi Zhang, Xianyi He, Lanjiong Li, Jinnan Chen, Lutao Jiang, Qishen Yin, Long Quan, Ying-Cong Chen, Li Yuan

Preprint. arXiv:2512.21185. 2025

Website Paper Code

ICCVW 2025 Oral

SEED-Story: Multimodal Long Story Generation with Large Language Model

Shuai Yang, Yuying Ge, Yang Li, Yukang Chen, Yixiao Ge, Ying Shan, Yingcong Chen

Oral, Workshop on Human-Interactive Generation and Editing, International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV). 2025

Paper Model Data Code

ICLR 2024

GNeRP: Gaussian guided Neural Reconstruction of Reflective Objects with Noisy Polarization Priors

Yang Li, Ruizheng Wu, Jiyong Li, Yingcong Chen

International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR). 2024

Project Page Paper Data Code

AAAI 2024

Contrastive Continual Learning with Importance Sampling and Prototype-Instance Relation Distillation

Jiyong Li, Dilshod Azizov, Yang Li, Shangsong Liang

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). 2024

Paper Code

Sensors 2021

DCNet: Densely Connected Deep Convolutional Encoder Decoder Network for Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma Segmentation

Yang Li, Guanghui Han, Xiujian Liu

Sensors 2021, 21(23), 7877. 2021

Paper Code

Honors & Awards

Professional Services

Conference Reviewer

NeurIPS, ICLR, CVPR, AISTATS, ICML · 2025–2026

Teaching Assistant

• CS 439 Introduction to Data Science · Spring 2026
• CS 205 Discrete Mathematics · Fall 2025

Research Interests

I study latent-space reasoning in multimodal foundation models, especially for search, parallel reasoning, and 3D/spatial understanding.