Dr. Yili ZHAO

Email: yilizhao [DOT] cs [AT] gmail [DOT] com
Address: 1199 Coleman Ave, San Jose, CA 95110, United States
PhD advisor: Prof. Jernej Barbič
My Curriculum Vitae
Dept. of Computer Science, Viterbi School of Engineering, University of Southern California

I am currently a research engineer at ByteDance. Prior to it, I was a Research Engineer at Facebook AI Research (FAIR) (Dec. 2014 - Oct. 2021).

I successfully defended my PhD thesis, "Plant Substructuring and Real-time Simulation Using Model Reduction" in April, 2014.

My research interests primarily focus on computer graphics, physically-based simulation etc.
Before I came to the U.S. I received M.S. degree from Dept. of Computer Science, EECS, Peking University, Beijing, China.

Publications

M-ABD simulation with the SIGGRAPH 2026 logo

 Zhiyong He, Dewen Guo, Minghao Guo, Yili Zhao, Wojciech Matusik, Hao Su, Chenfanfu Jiang, Peter Yichen Chen, Yin Yang,
"M-ABD: Scalable, Efficient, and Robust Multi-Affine-Body Dynamics",
ACM Transactions on Graphics 45(4) (SIGGRAPH 2026)
[project page] [paper] [video]

Habitat 2.0 robot rearranging objects with NeurIPS 2021 logo

 Andrew Szot, Alexander Clegg, Eric Undersander, Erik Wijmans, Yili Zhao, John Turner, Noah Maestre, Mustafa Mukadam, Devendra Singh Chaplot, Oleksandr Maksymets, Aaron Gokaslan, Vladimír Vondruš, Sameer Dharur, Franziska Meier, Wojciech Galuba, Angel Chang, Zsolt Kira, Vladlen Koltun, Jitendra Malik, Manolis Savva, Dhruv Batra,
"Habitat 2.0: Training Home Assistants to Rearrange their Habitat",
Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 34 (NeurIPS 2021)
Spotlight (Top 3%)
[project page] [paper] [video]

Habitat logo with ICCV 2019 conference logo

 Manolis Savva*, Abhishek Kadian*, Oleksandr Maksymets*, Yili Zhao, Erik Wijmans, Bhavana Jain, Julian Straub, Jia Liu, Vladlen Koltun, Jitendra Malik, Devi Parikh, Dhruv Batra, (* joint 1st authors);
"Habitat: A Platform for Embodied AI Research",
IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV 2019)
Best Paper Nominee (Top 0.25%)
[project page] [paper] [video]


Bohan Wang, Yili Zhao, Jernej Barbič, "Botanical Materials Based on Biomechanics",
ACM Transactions on Graphics 36(4) (SIGGRAPH 2017)
[project page] [paper] [video]


Hongyi Xu*, Yili Zhao*, Jernej Barbič, (* joint 1st authors);
"Implicit Multibody Penalty-based Distributed Contact",
IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, Volume 20, 2014
[project page] [paper] [video]


Yili Zhao, Jernej Barbič, "Interactive Authoring of Simulation-Ready Plants",
ACM Transactions on Graphics 32(4) (SIGGRAPH 2013)
[project page] [paper] [video]
Our video clip has been selected as part of the [Technical Papers Video Trailer]


Jernej Barbič, Yili Zhao, "Real-time Large-deformation Substructuring",
ACM Transactions on Graphics 30(4) (SIGGRAPH 2011)
[project page] [paper] [video]
[Oak tree video (HD)] has been selected as part of the [Technical Papers Video Trailer]

Personal

I love the Daland's Swim Stadium (originally the McDonald’s Olympic Swim Stadium), USC (the main Aquatics venue at the 1984 Olympic Games). I swam a lot there, free style, 1 mile (nonstop) per day.