Colloquium Details
Generative Computer Vision for the Physical World
Speaker: Ruoshi Liu, Columbia University
Location: 60 Fifth Avenue 150
Date: March 21, 2025, 11 a.m.
Host: David Fouhey
Synopsis:
Generative models are revolutionizing our world, with the ability to generate photorealistic visual content that are indistinguishable from reality. Despite their overwhelming presence in the cyber world, they haven’t been very useful in the physical world that we live in. In this talk, I will present how the rich priors learned by large-scale generative models—ranging from shape and geometry to motion and dynamics—can be harnessed for real-world perception and interaction tasks. I will showcase how these models can facilitate tasks like 3D reconstruction and robotic manipulation by incorporating the structure of the physical world. Moreover, I will discuss methods to further refine and adapt these systems through self-learning, enabling machines to continually improve as they explore new scenarios and environments. Together, these breakthroughs build the foundation for my vision of creating self-supervised machines that can perceive and interact with the physical world.
Note: In-person attendance only available to those with active NYU ID cards.
Speaker Bio:
Ruoshi Liu is a doctoral candidate in computer science at Columbia University. His research focuses on developing computer vision systems that can intelligently interact with the physical world. His work received wide news coverage. Open-source models and datasets he developed have been downloaded and used more than a million times by other researchers and engineers in the field. For more details, please go to https://ruoshiliu.github.io/.