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Anyi Rao

Assistant Professor
Arts and Machine Creativity
Academy of Interdisciplinary Studies
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Email: anyirao [at] ust.hk

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Bio

Anyi Rao is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Arts and Machine Creativity (AMC) and the Division of Emerging Interdisciplinary Areas (EMIA) at the Academy of Interdisciplinary Studies (AIS) at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). He studies reliable, steerable and explaniable human-centered AI for creativity, multimodality, art and film, with focuses on intelligent media editing and creation, semantic and cinematic analysis, aiming to build connections between AI and humans for collaborative intelligence and unleash human creativity and productivity. His works include ControlNet, AnimateDiff, MovieNet, Virtual Studio, and Shoot360, with a Marr Prize (ICCV best paper award). These works have been widely used in industry, including Amazon Prime Video, Netflix, Tencent, and more.

He was a Postdoctoral Scholar at Stanford with Maneesh Agrawala. He received the Ph.D. at MMLab, Chinese University of Hong Kong with Dahua Lin and Bolei Zhou. He has research experiences at Meta Reality Lab, Vector Institute, University of Toronto, Hong Kong University. He assumes a leading role in the organization of the Creative Video Editing and Understanding Workshop at CVPR24, ICCV23, ECCV22, ICCV21, the Generative Models Course at SIGGRAPH24, and the 2023 Paris AI Short Film Festival. He also serves as a co-chair of UIST24, UIST25.

He has hosted the Brown Media Innovation Research Fund, Amazon Video Research Fund, and won the Rising Star Award at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference, Paper Digest’s Most Influential Paper Award. He gave keynote at the Magnolia Forum at the Shanghai TV Festival, was a guest on Shanghai TV’s Financial Channel, and spoke at the Night Talk of the World Artificial Intelligence Conference WAIC2024.

Actively looking for highly motivated students to join the group. See openings for more details. Please fill out this form and send an email if you are interested in.

News

  • 2024-10: Serve in ACM UIST 2025 organizing committee as a Registeration Co-Chair.
  • 2024-08: We are organizing the Course on Generative Models for Visual Content Editing and Creation at SIGGRAPH 2024.
  • 2024-08: Three paper are accepted to UIST 2024, ICML 2024 and ECCV 2024.
  • 2024-02: Cinematic Behavior Transfer is accepted to CVPR 2024. Our efforts on Intelligent Cinematography 🎬 Virtual Film Studio include our SIGGRAPH Virtual Dynamic Storyboard, CVPR Cinematic Behavior Transfer and ECCV Multi-camera Editing.
  • 2024-02: Serve in ACM UIST 2024 organizing committee as a Registeration Co-Chair.
  • 2024-01: We are organizing the Fourth Workshop on AI for Creative Visual Content Generation Editing and Understanding at CVPR 2024. Researchers, artists, video directors, and entrepreneurs from academia (Stanford, Berkeley), industry (Adobe, Netflix, Meta) and more, are going to share and sparkle their ideas together in Seattle! Please follow our Twitter for more information!
  • 2023-11: AnimateDiff is online and gets an update on SparseCtrl ability.
  • 2023-10: 🧑‍🎨 ControlNet receives the 🏆 Best Paper Award (Marr Prize) at ICCV 2023. V1 V1.1 A1111 WebUI
  • 2023-08: Three papers are accepted to ICCV 2023 as Oral, UIST 2023, and ACM MM 2023.
  • 2023-06: We are organizing 🍿 inaugural Paris AI ShortFest film festival, jointly with ICCV 2023 in Paris, France.
  • 2022-07: Two papers on 👷 City-Super Research: CityNeRF and Shoot360 are accepted to ECCV 2022 and SIGGRAPH 2022.
  • 2021-05: Our CVPR 2020 work SceneSeg is set as the baseline for the ACM Multimedia 2021 Grand Challenge: Tencent Ads Algorithm Competition. Participate to win USD$100,000 for the first prize.
  • 2020-07: MovieNet is online with an easy-to-use toolkit as a part of OpenMMLab.
    More
  • 2023-06: We are organizing the Third Workshop on AI for Creative Video Editing and Understanding at ICCV 2023 in Paris
  • 2023-04: Two papers are accepted to AAAI 2023 as Oral and IJCAI 2023.
  • 2022-10: We are organizing the Second Workshop on AI for Creative Video Editing and Understanding at ECCV 2022.
  • 2022-03: Two papers are accepted to CVPR 2022 and IEEE Transactions on Multimedia.
  • 2021-09: We are organizing the First Workshop on AI for Creative Video Editing and Understanding during ICCV 2021.
  • 2021-07: Two papers are accepted to ICCV 2021 and IEEE Transactions on Multimedia.
  • 2020-07: Three papers are accepted to ECCV 2020.
  • 2020-02: One paper is accepted to CVPR 2020. Also appears at LUV 2020 (15-min talk) and Sight and Sound 2020 (5-min talk).
  • 2020-01: HotFlip is included in AllenNLP and TextAttack
  • Selected Publication [Full List]

    ScriptViz: A Visualization Tool to Aid Scriptwriting based on a Large Movie Database
    Anyi Rao, Jean-Peïc Chou, Maneesh Agrawala
    User Interface Software and Technology (UIST), 2024
    [Paper] [Webpage]

    Cinematic Behavior Transfer via NeRF-based Differentiable Filming
    Xuekun Jiang*, Anyi Rao* (co-first), Jingbo Wang, Dahua Lin, Bo Dai
    IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024
    [Paper] [Webpage]

    AnimateDiff: Animate Your Personalized Text-to-Image Diffusion Models without Specific Tuning
    Yuwei Guo, Ceyuan Yang, Anyi Rao, Zhengyang Liang, Yaohui Wang, Yu Qiao, Maneesh Agrawala, Dahua Lin, Bo Dai
    International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2024 (Spotlight)
    [Paper] [Webpage]

    SparseCtrl: Adding Sparse Controls to Text-to-Video Diffusion Models
    Yuwei Guo, Ceyuan Yang, Anyi Rao, Maneesh Agrawala, Dahua Lin, Bo Dai
    European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2024
    [Paper] [Webpage]

    ControlNet: Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models
    Lvmin Zhang, Anyi Rao, Maneesh Agrawala
    IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2023 Best Paper Award (Marr Prize)
    [Paper] [Webpage] [Supplements] [V1] [V1.1] [A1111 WebUI]

    Automated Conversion of Music Videos into Lyric Videos
    Jiaju Ma, Anyi Rao, Li-Yi Wei, Rubaiat Habib Kazi, Hijung Valentina Shin, Maneesh Agrawala
    User Interface Software and Technology (UIST), 2023
    [Paper] [Webpage]

    Dynamic Storyboard Generation in an Engine-based Virtual Environments for Video Production
    Anyi Rao*, Xuekun Jiang*, Yuwei Guo, Linning Xu, Lei Yang, Libiao Jin, Dahua Lin, Bo Dai
    ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques Conference (SIGGRAPH) Poster, 2023
    [Paper] [Webpage]

    Shoot360: Normal View Video Creation from City Panorama Footage
    Anyi Rao, Linning Xu, Dahua Lin
    ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques Conference (SIGGRAPH), 2022
    [Paper] [Webpage]

    Temporal and Contextual Transformer for Multi-Camera Editing of TV Shows
    Anyi Rao, Xuekun Jiang, Sichen Wang, Yuwei Guo, Zihao Liu, Bo Dai, Long Pang, Xiaoyu Wu, Dahua Lin, Libiao Jin
    European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCVW), 2022
    [Paper] [Webpage]

    A Coarse-to-Fine Framework for Automatic Video Unscreen
    Anyi Rao, Linning Xu, Zhizhong Li, Qingqiu Huang, Zhanghui Kuang, Wayne Zhang, Dahua Lin
    IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, (TMM), 2022
    [Paper] [Webpage]

    BungeeNeRF: Progressive Neural Radiance Field for Extreme Multi-scale Scene Rendering
    Also known as CityNeRF: Building NeRF at City Scale
    Yuanbo Xiangli*, Linning Xu*, Xingang Pan, Nanxuan Zhao, Anyi Rao, Christian Theobalt, Bo Dai, Dahua Lin
    European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022
    [Paper] [Webpage]

    Jointly Learning the Attributes and Composition of Shots for Boundary Detection in Videos
    Xuekun Jiang, Libiao Jin, Anyi Rao+(corresponding), Linning Xu, Dahua Lin
    IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, (TMM), 2021
    [Paper] [Webpage]

    A Local-to-Global Approach to Multi-modal Movie Scene Segmentation
    Anyi Rao, Linning Xu, Yu Xiong, Guodong Xu, Qingqiu Huang, Bolei Zhou, Dahua Lin
    IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020
    LUV 2020 and Sight and Sound 2020 workshops (Oral)
    [Paper] [Webpage]

    A Unified Framework for Shot Type Classification Based on Subject Centric Lens
    Anyi Rao, Jiaze Wang, Linning Xu, Xuekun Jiang, Qingqiu Huang, Bolei Zhou, Dahua Lin
    European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020
    Video Turing Test 2020 Workshop (Oral)
    [Paper] [Webpage]

    Online Multi-modal Person Search in Videos
    Jiayue Xia, Anyi Rao+(corresponding), Linning Xu, Qingqiu Huang, Dahua Lin
    European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020
    [Paper] [Webpage]

    MovieNet: A Holistic Dataset for Movie Understanding
    Qingqiu Huang, Yu Xiong, Anyi Rao, Jiaze Wang, Dahua Lin
    European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Spotlight)
    [Paper] [Webpage]

    Awards and Grants

  • Rising Star by World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC)
  • 2024
  • Adobe and Pika Grant for CVPR Workshop Organization
  • 2024
  • Best Paper Award (Marr Prize) by International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)
  • 2023
  • Magic Grant by The Brown Institute for Media Innovation
  • 2023
  • Amazon Prime Video Gift Funding
  • 2023
  • Pika and KAUST Grant for ICCV Workshop Organization
  • 2023
  • KAUST Grant for ECCV Workshop Organization
  • 2022
  • Adobe Grant for ICCV Workshop Organization
  • 2021
  • Hong Kong PhD Fellowship
  • 2021
  • Most Influential Paper by Paper Digest
  • 2020
  • Nanjing University Top-Grade Scholarship, the highest honor in the university
  • 2018
  • SenseTime Scholarship, awarded to 30 students out of all AI major undergraduate students in China
  • 2017
  • Provincial Merit Student awarded by the Jiangsu Province
  • 2017
  • National Scholarship awarded by the China Ministry of Education
  • 2015
  • Gold Medal in Invitational National Mathematical Olympiad
  • 2013
    More
  • Nanjing University Outstanding Student Leader Award
  • 2015
  • Nanjing University Outstanding Student Award
  • 2016
  • Nanjing University Top Volunteer Excellence Award
  • 2015
  • Zhenggang Scholarship, top 40 students in Nanjing University
  • 2016
  • Zhenggang Jingying Scholarship
  • 2017
  • Nanjing University People Scholarship
  • 2016
  • Nanjing University People Scholarship
  • 2017
  • World ranking 32nd in 2016 Calculus World Cup
  • 2016
  • Meritorious winner prize in the 2016 National Mathematical Contest in Modeling
  • 2016
  • Best paper in the 2014 University Electronics Design Contest
  • 2014

    Talks

  • Bridging the Representation Gap of Humans and Computers for Video Production
      • World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC), 07/2024
      • Shanghai Television Festival, 06/2024
      • University of Hong Kong (HKU), 05/2024
      • Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), 05/2024
      • Stanford University, 04/2024
      • Hong Kong Shanghai AI Forum, 04/2024
  • Collaborative Intelligent Tools to Support Video Production
  • Creative Video Understanding, Editing and Generation
  • Controllable Visual Content Generation to Unleash Creativity and Productivity
      • Netflix, 11/2023
      • Bay Area Vision Day (Stanford, Berkeley, Caltech), 09/2023
  • Temporal and Contextual Transformer for Multi-Camera Editing
      • ECCV22 Workshop, 10/2022
  • Multimodal Representation Learning
      • Meta, Redmond, WA, 12/2022
      • CVPR20 Workshop on Sight and Sound, 06/2020
      • CVPR20 Workshop on Learning from Unlabeled Videos, 06/2020
  • Cinematic Style Analysis Based on Subject Centric Lens
      • ECCV20 Workshop on Video Turing Test: Human-level Video Story Understanding, 08/2020

    Press Coverage

  • Media/Entertainment Industry: Shanghai TV Festival / China News
  • World AI Conference: Video Generation Forum / Rising Star
  • Art: Hidden Imagery In AI Art / Funky AI-generated Spiraling Medieval Village Captivates Social Media
  • Professional Activities

  • Co-Chair (Registeration) for UIST25
  • Co-Chair (Registeration) and Session Chair for UIST24
  • Key organizer: Paris AI ShortFest film festival, France 2023.
  • Leading/key organizer: Workshop on AI for Creative Video Editing and Understanding at CVPR 2024, ICCV 2023, ECCV 2022, ICCV 2021
  • Conference Reviewer: over 40 times on CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, ACCV, SIGGRAPH, SIGGRAPH Asia, Eurographics, CHI, UIST, MM, NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, AAAI, IJCAI
  • Journal Reviewer: IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI), IEEE Transactions on Multimedia (TMM), IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG), IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology (TCSVT), ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG), Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR), International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV)
  • Judge: The 3rd International Artificial Intelligence Fair
  • Research Experiences

  • Research Intern at Meta Reality Lab
  • Research Intern at Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
  • Research Intern at SenseTime Research
  • Visitor at the University of Toronto and Vector Institute
  • Research Assistant at the Advanced Integration and Mining Lab, Eugene, OR, USA
  • Research Intern at University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong S.A.R.
  • Teaching Experiences

    Course Instructor, HKUST AMC 5140 AI for Visual Arts and Creativity (AVAC)
    Course Instructor, HKUST AMC 5150 Visual Computing for Visual Arts and Creativity (VCVAC)
    Course Instructor, HKUST AMC 5250 Filmmaking with AI Innovations (FilmAI)
    Course Instructor, HKUST EMIA 6500H AI for Visual Content Creation (AIVCC)
    Course Instructor, SIGGRAPH 2024 Course on Generative Models for Visual Content Editing and Creation
    Course Instructor, CCF 2024 Advanced Disciplines Lectures
    Head TA, CUHK IERG 4160, Image and Video Processing (graduate level)
    TA, CUHK IERG 3180, Microcontrollers and Embedded Systems Laboratory

    Patents

    A Video Generation Method, CN202210699177.X
    A Video Editing Method and Related Program Products, CN202210691662.2
    A Video Editing Method, CN202010694551.1
    A Video Classification Method, CN202010694811.1
    An Image Processing Method and Related Products, CN202010450801.3
    A Zero-shot Action Recognition Method, CN202110821209.4
    A Layout Generation Method, CN202111128

    Miscellaneous

    Undergrad

    Click to expand

    Undergrad Academic

    His GPA ranked No.1 in each semester during his undergraduate studies at Nanjing University with an overall GPA: 3.96/4.00 and Rank: 1/183. He finished major curricula in 2 years and learned a bunch of online courses. [Whole]

    Undergrad Research Beginning

    Robust Training with Word-level Adversity for NLP
    Sept. 2017 - April. 2018   Advanced Integration and Mining Lab (AIM), Eugene, OR, United States of America
    Advisor: Prof. Dejing Dou (Director, Head of Baidu Big Data Lab) and Prof. Daniel Lowd [The Register]

    Automatic Music Accompaniment Using Probabilistic Machine Learning
    Jul. 2017 - Aug. 2017   The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong S.A.R.
    Advisor: Prof. Francis Lau (Associate Dean) [Arxiv]

    Real-time 3D Surface Reconstruction Using Lidar (Light Detection And Ranging)
    Aug. 2016 - Sept. 2017   Visual Sensing and Graphics Lab (VISG Lab), Nanjing University
    Supervisor: Prof. Sidan Du (Director) [Report] [Video]

    Undergrad Course Projects

    Computer Vision: 3D Human Poses Estimation from a Single Image [Presentation]
    Convex Optimization: Road Car Flow Prediction [Report]
    Probability and Stochastic Process: Monte Carlo for Multidimensional Integrals [Report]
    Microcomputers and Interface Techniques: x86 Assembly Language Programming [Report]
    Signal Processing: Single-Photon Detector Design [Report] [Presentation]

    Volunteer Experiences

    Click to expand

    Co-Founder of a Children Care Volunteer Program     Sep. 2015 - Dec. 2015
    Co-founded a psychological consulting program to promote left-behind children's growth and education. Volunteered to teach left-behind children Math and English in a junior high school located in the remote, underdeveloped Xiushui county. Recognized as a key team leader in the successful Warm One Hundred Campaign, which raised money for left-behind children. Our group received an excellence award from the China Foundation for Poverty Alleviation.

    Vice President of a Young Volunteers Association at Nanjing University     Jun. 2015 - Jun. 2016
    Organized and participated in over 100 out-of-school and 20 in-school activities covering over 1000 volunteers. Our association received a volunteer association excellence award.

    Campus Ambassador of Huawei     Aug. 2017 - Dec. 2017

    Student Volunteer of International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)     Dec. 2019