About

Ph.D. researcher in diffusion-based controllable generation and visual world models, with first- or co-first-author papers at NeurIPS, CVPR, and 3DV and two Meta Reality Labs internships. Research spans image and video synthesis, long-horizon generation, multimodal conditioning, and visual outcome prediction; current work explores bidirectional LLM–diffusion reasoning and multimodal post-training.

Advised by Prof. Yu-Xiong Wang at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Current Research

Research vision: connect the complementary priors and capabilities of language models and visual generative models bidirectionally, so generated visual outcomes can inform subsequent reasoning instead of remaining one-way decoded outputs.

Computer-use visual world model

Action-conditioned image diffusion · mixture of transformers

Building a SenseNova mixture-of-transformers (MoT) image-diffusion world model for action-conditioned visual forward prediction: given the current UI and a candidate action, it predicts one next UI screenshot for computer-use agent look-ahead.

The work spans diffusion post-training and Reasoner–Generator interface and training design, including structured consequence supervision, an interpretable text path, and experimental cache-preserving inference. Current research explores outcome-verified post-training and joint-training strategies that preserve Reasoner–Generator compatibility for candidate-action evaluation.

Physical-event world model

Video diffusion · multimodal reasoning

Post-training a Cosmos3 video-diffusion world model to predict physical events and outcomes from RGB history.

Current work explores a teacher-guided Reasoner–Generator loop that compares generated and target outcomes to adapt video reasoning and generation.

Robot-interaction world model

Motion-conditioned video diffusion

Motion-conditioned video-diffusion world model for predicting robot–object interactions from an initial observation and prescribed robot motion.

The synthetic prototype studies query-time proxy-to-target correspondence across robot embodiments and evaluates trajectories, contacts, and task outcomes.

Selected Publications

Google Scholar

Dress&Dance: Dress up and Dance as You Like It

Jun-Kun Chen, Aayush Bansal, Minh Phuoc Vo, Yu-Xiong Wang

arXiv 2025 · Under review at WACV 2027 · First author

A unified conditioning mechanism for garment, identity, text, layout, pose, and motion control, together with paired-triplet data generation and multi-stage training.

Additional publications

Publications appear under Jun-Kun Chen; earlier papers may use Junkun Chen or J. Chen. * denotes equal contribution.

Experience

Meta Reality Labs

Research Scientist Intern

May–Aug. 2023 · Zurich, Switzerland
May–Dec. 2025 · Bay Area, CA

2025: Scaled a separate generative-model training program to 128–256 GPUs across multi-node clusters, supporting faster model and data iteration.

2023: Created context-rich multi-view conditioning, 3D-consistent structured noise, and self-supervised consistency training for ConsistDreamer (CVPR 2024).

SpreeAI

AI Research Intern

May 2024–May 2025 · Remote, U.S.

Dress&Dance (WACV 2027, under review): multimodal conditioning and data-efficient multi-stage training for garment, identity, pose, and motion control.

Virtual Fitting Room (NeurIPS 2025): anchored autoregressive generation for identity-consistent, minute-scale try-on video trained from short clips.

Earlier Research

Mila – Quebec AI Institute (2020): knowledge-graph reasoning for RNNLogic (ICLR 2021). Baidu NLP (2019–2020): scene-aware dialogue generation for the DSTC8 Workshop at AAAI 2020.

Education

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Ph.D. Candidate in Computer Science · Expected Dec. 2026
Advisor: Yu-Xiong Wang

Tsinghua University

B.Eng. in Computer Science, Yao Class · 2017–2021
Major GPA: 3.94/4.0

Selected Honors

  • ICPC EC-Final — Gold Medal, 4th Place (2018)
  • ICPC Qingdao Regional — Gold Medal, 2nd Place (2018)
  • CCPC Harbin Regional — Gold Medal (2017)
  • National Olympiad in Informatics — Gold Medal (2016)