WORLD MODELS · GENERATIVE AI
Tao Hu 胡涛
Full Professor
Huazhong University of Science and Technology
World models for interactive, closed-loop simulation.
I am a Full Professor at HUST and lead VIBE Lab. My research centers on world models: learning geometric and semantic representations, modeling how environments evolve, and generating controllable future states.
I received my Ph.D. from the University of Amsterdam, advised by Cees G. M. Snoek and Pascal Mettes, and was a postdoctoral researcher in Björn Ommer’s lab at LMU Munich.
World modelsDiffusion & flow matching
Research Keywords
- Memory in World Model
- Efficiency in World Model
- Multiplayer World Models
- Rolling-Based, Continuation-Based World Model
- Loop Transformer
- Tokenizer-Free
- Continuous Discrete Diffusion
- Weight-Space Programming
JOIN VIBE LAB
2028 级研究生招生
招收保研/推免硕士研究生 4 人、博士研究生 2 人，欢迎与我联系！
LATEST UPDATES
News
| Jul 27, 2026 | Selected as an Excellent Reviewer for ECCV 2026. |
|---|---|
| May 27, 2026 | Diversifying Similar Subjects for Text-to-image Synthesis with Self-Cross Diffusion Guidance is accepted by IJCV, congrats to Weimin, Jieke, and Meng. |
| Mar 13, 2026 | I joined Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST) as a Full Professor. |
| Feb 22, 2026 | Guiding Token-Sparse Diffusion Models is accepted by CVPR 2026, Congrats to Felix and the team~ |
| Jan 22, 2026 | Purrception: Variational Flow Matching for Vector-Quantized Image Generation is accepted by ICLR 2026. |
PAPERS
Recent preprints
BACKGROUND
Experience
Appointments
- Apr 2026–present
- Full Professor · HUSTGenerative artificial intelligence research.
- Sep 2026–present
- Chief Technical Expert · Dongfeng Motor R&D InstitutePart-time · World models and interactive closed-loop simulation.
- Nov 2023–Nov 2025
- Postdoctoral Researcher · LMU MunichOmmer-Lab · Björn Ommer.
- 2018–2023
- Ph.D. Researcher · University of AmsterdamVISLAB · Cees G. M. Snoek and Pascal Mettes.
Industry internships
- Jun 2020–Oct 2020
- Amazon · AWS RekognitionApplied Scientist InternSemi-supervised and few-shot learning.
- Jul 2017–May 2018
- Megvii Face++Research InternHuman pose estimation.
Earlier research internship at Xiaomi (2017).
ACADEMIC COMMUNITY
Service
- Workshop Organization
- CVPR eVLM Workshop, 2025 · Co-organizer
- ECCV AVGenL: Audio-Visual Generation and Learning Workshop, 2024 · Co-organizer
- NxtAim Workshop: Theory and Practical Aspects of Stable Diffusion · Lead organizer
- Area Chair (Workshops)
- CVPR AI4CC Workshop, 2024
- CVPR Workshop on Efficient Large Vision Model, 2024
- ECCV AVGenL: Audio-Visual Generation and Learning Workshop, 2024
- Session Chair
- AAAI Computer Vision Oral Session, 2025
- Conference Reviewer
- International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)
- International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML)
- Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS)
- IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)
- IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)
- European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV)
- AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)
- NeurIPS Datasets and Benchmarks Track
- IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)
- International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS)
- Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
- International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING)
- Learning on Graphs Conference (LoG)
- Asian Conference on Computer Vision (ACCV)
- British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC)
- IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV)
- German Conference on Pattern Recognition (GCPR)
- Journal Reviewer
- IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI)
- Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR)
- IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology (TCSVT)
- IEEE Transactions on Multimedia (TMM)
- Computer Vision and Image Understanding (CVIU)
- Workshop Reviewer
- ICLR Workshop on Generative and Experimental Perspectives for Biomolecular Design, 2024
- NeurIPS Workshop on Diffusion Models, 2023
- AAAI Workshop on Privacy-Preserving Artificial Intelligence, 2024
- ICML GenLaw Workshop, 2023, 2024
- ICML Frontiers4lcd Workshop, 2023, 2024
- NeurIPS Workshop on Self-Supervised Learning Theory and Practice, 2023, 2024
- NeurIPS Workshop on Symmetry and Geometry in Neural Representations, 2024
- Workshop Proposal Reviewer
- NeurIPS, 2024
- Teaching & Mentoring
- Teaching and co-supervision at LMU Munich and the University of Amsterdam, spanning computer vision, generative models, and representation learning.
- Selected Recognition
- ICML 2026 · Silver Reviewer Award
- NeurIPS 2024 · Top Reviewer
- CVPR 2023 · Doctoral Consortium travel support; selected among the top 13% of 411 applicants