Hui Ren

Hui Ren (任辉)

I am a second-year UIUC CS Ph.D. student, advised by Prof. Alexander Schwing. I hold a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science at ShanghaiTech University, and I was an exchange student at MIT in 2024 Spring.

I am honored to be an Amazon AI PhD Fellow. In Summer 2026, I was an Applied Scientist Intern at Amazon (Alexa AI), mentored by Dr. Lei Fan.

I was very fortunate to join the MIT CSAIL Vision Group advised by Prof. Antonio Torralba, Prof. David Bau and mentor Dr. Joanna Materzyńska. I was also a visiting student at UCLA Visual Machines Group advised by Prof. Achuta Kadambi and mentor Dr. Shijie Zhou. From Feb. 2023 to Feb. 2024, I acted as an undergraduate research assistant in PLUS Lab, advised by Prof. Xuming He and mentor Dr. Chuyu Zhang.

Email / CV / Github / LinkedIn / Google Scholar / X

Research

My current research focuses on Multimodal Generation and Understanding, with a particular interest in language, video, image generation and multimodal agent memory. Previously, I explored Optimal Transport theory for Unsupervised Deep Clustering and 3D Semi-Supervised Learning, with a focus on imbalanced and open-world scenarios.

Generally speaking, my research aim is advancing intelligent systems that can simulate, understand, and interact with the world while efficiently leveraging prior knowledge to generalize across diverse real-world scenarios. - How far are we from the genuine advent of Artificial General Intelligence?

I am open to collaboration and discussion. If you are interested, don't hesitate to reach out!

Publications

Note: * indicates equal contribution.

	Hierarchical Continuous Diffusion Language Models Hui Ren, Zihan Li, Chang Liu, Huidong Liu, Alexander Schwing Under Review Paper / Website / Code
	Beyond the Timeline: Augmenting Long-Video Memory with Grounded Entity Biographies Hui Ren, Lei Fan, Henry Pao, Han Guo, Zeeshan Zia, Ying Chen, Alexander Schwing, Gang Hua Under Review Paper / Website / Code
	VideoSketcher: Sequential Sketch Generation Using Video Model Priors Hui Ren, Yuval Alaluf, Omer Bar Tal, Alexander Schwing, Antonio Torralba, Yael Vinker Under Review Paper / Website / Code
	Opt-In Art: Learning Art Styles Only from Few Examples Hui Ren, Joanna Materzyńska, Rohit Gandikota, Giannis Daras, David Bau, Antonio Torralba NeurIPS, 2025 Paper / Website / Code / Demo
	Feature4X: Bridging Any Monocular Video to 4D Agentic AI with Versatile Gaussian Feature Fields Shijie Zhou, Hui Ren, Yijia Weng, Shuwang Zhang, Zhen Wang, Dejia Xu, Zhiwen Fan, Suya You, Zhangyang Wang, Leonidas Guibas, Achuta Kadambi CVPR, 2025 Paper / Website / Code
	P²OT: Progressive Partial Optimal Transport for Deep Imbalanced Clustering Chuyu Zhang, Hui Ren, Xuming He ICLR, 2024 Paper / Code
	SP²OT: Semantic-Regularized Progressive Partial Optimal Transport for Imbalanced Clustering Chuyu Zhang, Hui Ren, Xuming He arXiv, 2024 Paper / Code
	Dual-level Adaptive Self-Labeling for Novel Class Discovery in Point Cloud Segmentation Ruijie Xu, Chuyu Zhang, Hui Ren, Xuming He ECCV, 2024 Paper / Code
	Cascaded Sparse Feature Propagation Network for Interactive Segmentation Chuyu Zhang, Chuanyang Hu, Hui Ren, Yongfei Liu, Xuming He BMVC, 2023 Paper / Code

Activities

Spring 2025: Teaching Assistant in CS182 Introduction to Machine Learning
May 2024: Attend and present poster at ICLR 2024, Vienna, Austria
Fall 2022: Teaching Assistant in SI100B Introduction to Information Science and Technology

Academic Service

2026: Reviewer, NeurIPS 2026
2026: Reviewer, How Do Vision Models Work (HOW), CVPR 2026 Workshop

Selected Awards and Honors

2025: Amazon AI PhD Fellowship
2025: Shanghai & University's Outstanding Graduate (Top 5% in school)
2024: National Scholarship (Top 0.2% nationwide, highest scholarship in China)
2024: Outstanding Student (Ranked top 2% in school)
2024: International Exchange Program First-class Scholarship (Top 2% in school)
2023: Outstanding Student (Ranked top 2% in school)
2023: Third prize, The 14th Chinese Mathematics Competition
2022: Merit Student (Ranked top 3%-7% in school)
2019: First prize, The 5th Annual International Mathematical Modeling Challenge, Greater China Region Contest