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Lingjie Liu (UPenn): “Beyond Photorealism: 3D Reconstruction and Generation with Multimodal and Physical Grounding”
Abstract:
Progress in 3D reconstruction and generation has accelerated rapidly, producing increasingly detailed geometry and photorealistic rendering. However, moving beyond photorealism requires models that not only look correct, but are also semantically grounded and physically plausible. This talk focuses on two complementary directions. First, multimodal grounding: 3D representations should align naturally with language and images to support cross-modal understanding, controllable generation, and intuitive editing. Second, physical grounding: reconstructions and synthesized scenes should respect constraints such as support, contact, and feasible motion, enabling reliable interaction and deployment in embodied settings, including robotics. I will present our recent work toward multimodally aligned and physics-aware 3D reconstruction and generation, and discuss the challenges that lie ahead.
Biography:
Lingjie Liu is the Aravind K. Joshi Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania, where she leads the Penn Computer Graphics Lab and is a core member of the GRASP Lab and the ASSETS Center. Previously, she was a Lise Meitner Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics and received her Ph.D. from the University of Hong Kong in 2019. She serves as an Associate Editor for ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG) and IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG), and as Program Chair for 3DV 2026, Pacific Graphics 2026, and ACM SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation (SCA) 2025. Her research lies at the intersection of computer graphics, computer vision, and AI, with a focus on neural scene representations and rendering, human performance modeling and capture, and 3D reconstruction. Her work has been recognized with the Meta Distinguished Faculty Award and Best Paper Honorable Mentions at SIGGRAPH and ACM SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation.
