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Kang Liao 廖康

I am a Research Fellow at the MMLab@NTU, S-Lab, and working with Prof. Chen Change Loy, Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. Before joining NTU, I obtained my Ph.D. degree in 2023 at Beijing Jiaotong University (BJTU), advised by Prof. Chunyu Lin and Prof. Yao Zhao. I was a visiting scholar at Max Planck Institute for Informatics (MPII) in Computer Graphics Department advised by Vahid Babaei and Prof. Hans-Peter Seidel.

Research Interests

My recent research interests include unified multimodal models, spatial AI, and world models.

  kang.liao AT ntu DOT edu DOT sg             Github             Google Scholar

Selected Preprint

VLANeXt: Recipes for Building Strong VLA Models
Xiao-Ming Wu, Bin Fan, Kang Liao, Jian-Jian Jiang, Runze Yang, Yihang Luo, Zhonghua Wu, Wei-Shi Zheng, Chen Change Loy
[arXiv] [Project Page] [Github]

Deep Learning for Camera Calibration and Beyond: A Survey
Kang Liao, Lang Nie, Shujuan Huang, Chunyu Lin, Jing Zhang, Yao Zhao, Moncef Gabbouj, Dacheng Tao
[arXiv] [Project Page]

Selected Publications

Thinking with Camera: A Unified Multimodal Model for Camera-Centric Understanding and Generation
Kang Liao, Size Wu, Zhonghua Wu, Linyi Jin, Chao Wang, Yikai Wang, Fei Wang, Wei Li, Chen Change Loy
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2026)
[arXiv] [Project Page] [Github] [Dataset] [Model] [Demo]

Next Visual Granularity Generation
Yikai Wang, Zhouxia Wang, Zhonghua Wu, Qingyi Tao, Kang Liao, Chen Change Loy
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2026)
[arXiv] [Project Page] [Github]

From Editor to Dense Geometry Estimator
Jiyuan Wang, Chunyu Lin, Lei Sun, Rongying Liu, Lang Nie, Mingxing Li, Kang Liao, Xiangxiang Chu, Yao Zhao
IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR 2026)
[arXiv] [Project Page] [Github]

Revisiting 360 Depth Estimation with PanoGabor: A New Fusion Perspective
Zhijie Shen, Chunyu Lin, Lang Nie, Kang Liao, Weisi Lin, Yao Zhao
IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI 2026)
[arXiv] [Github]

MOWA: Multiple-in-One Image Warping Model
Kang Liao, Zongsheng Yue, Zhonghua Wu, Chen Change Loy
IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI 2025)
[arXiv] [Project Page] [Github]

Denoising as Adaptation: Noise-Space Domain Adaptation for Image Restoration
Kang Liao, Zongsheng Yue, Zhouxia Wang, Chen Change Loy
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2025)
[arXiv] [Project Page] [Github]

Arbitrary-steps Image Super-resolution via Diffusion Inversion
Zongsheng Yue, Kang Liao, Chen Change Loy
IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR 2025)
[arXiv] [Github] [Demo]

Jasmine: Harnessing Diffusion Prior for Self-supervised Depth Estimation
JiYuan Wang, Chunyu Lin, Cheng Guan, Lang Nie, Jing He, Haodong Li, Kang Liao, Yao Zhao The Thirty-ninth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2025)
[Paper] [Project Page] [Github]

StabStitch++: Unsupervised Online Video Stitching with Spatiotemporal Bidirectional Warps
Lang Nie, Chunyu Lin, Kang Liao, Yun Zhang, Shuaicheng Liu, Yao Zhao
IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI 2025)
[Paper] [Github] [Video]

Semi-Supervised Coupled Thin-Plate Spline Model for Rotation Correction and Beyond
Lang Nie, Chunyu Lin, Kang Liao, Shuaicheng Liu, Yao Zhao
IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI 2024)
[arXiv] [Github]

360 Layout Estimation via Orthogonal Planes Disentanglement and Multi-view Geometric Consistency Perception
IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI 2024)
Zhijie Shen, Chunyu Lin, Junsong Zhang, Lang Nie, Kang Liao, Yao Zhao
[arXiv] [Github]

Eliminating Warping Shakes for Unsupervised Online Video Stitching
Lang Nie, Chunyu Lin, Kang Liao, Yun Zhang, Shuaicheng Liu, Rui Ai, Yao Zhao
European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV 2024)
[arXiv] [Github] [Video]

RecRecNet: Rectangling Rectified Wide-Angle Images by Thin-Plate Spline Model and DoF-based Curriculum Learning
Kang Liao*, Lang Nie*, Chunyu Lin, Zishuo Zheng, Yao Zhao
(*Equal contribution.)
International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV 2023)
[arXiv] [Github]

Parallax-Tolerant Unsupervised Deep Image Stitching
Lang Nie, Chunyu Lin, Kang Liao, Shuaicheng Liu, Yao Zhao
International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV 2023)
[arXiv] [Github]

Learning Deposition Policies for Fused Multi-Material 3D Printing
Kang Liao∗, Thibault Tricard∗, Michal Piovarci, Hans-Peter Seidel, Vahid Babaei
IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2023)
(*Equal contribution.)
[PDF] [Video]

Cylin-Painting: Seamless 360° Panoramic Image Outpainting and Beyond
Kang Liao, Xiangyu Xu, Chunyu Lin, Wenqi Ren, Yunchao Wei, Yao Zhao
IEEE Transactions on Image Processing (IEEE TIP 2023)
[arXiv] [Github]

PanoFormer: Panorama Transformer for Indoor 360° Depth Estimation
Zhijie Shen, Chunyu Lin, Kang Liao, Lang Nie, Zishuo Zheng, Yao Zhao
European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV 2022)
[arXiv] [Github] [Chinese Blog]

Deep Rectangling for Image Stitching: A Learning Baseline
Lang Nie, Chunyu Lin, Kang Liao, Shuaicheng Liu, Yao Zhao
IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR 2022, Oral)
[PDF] [Github] [Chinese Blog]

Multi-Level Curriculum for Training A Distortion-Aware Barrel Distortion Rectification Model
Kang Liao, Chunyu Lin, Lixin Liao, Yao Zhao, Weiyao Lin
International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV 2021)
[PDF]

Towards Complete Scene and Regular Shape for Distortion Rectification by Curve-Aware Extrapolation
Kang Liao, Chunyu Lin, Yunchao Wei, Feng Li, Shangrong Yang, Yao Zhao
International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV 2021)
[PDF]

Appearance Flow-based Progressively Complementary Network for Distortion Rectification
Shangrong Yang*, Chunyu Lin*, Kang Liao*, Chunjie Zhang, Yao Zhao
IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR 2021)
(*Equal contribution.)
[PDF] [Github]

A Deep Ordinal Distortion Estimation Approach for Distortion Rectification
Kang Liao, Chunyu Lin, Yao Zhao
IEEE Transactions on Image Processing (IEEE TIP 2021)
[arxiv] [Github]


Selected Awards

  • Winner of the MVL Challenge on OmniCV workshop at CVPR2023 (Jun. 2023)
  • Outstanding Doctoral Graduates of Beijing (Jun. 2023)
  • ZHIXING Scholarship (or President Scholarship) of BJTU (Jun. 2021)
  • China National Scholarship (Oct. 2021, Oct. 2020)

Professional Activities

Area Chairs

  • CVPR 2026
  • NeurIPS 2025
  • ICASSP 2026
  • IJCNN 2025-2026

Co-organizers

Reviewers

  • Journals: IJCV, TIP, TVCG, TMI, TMLR, TCSVT
  • Conferences: CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, ICLR, ICML, NeurIPS (Top Reviewer in 2024), AAAI, ICRA

Talks

  • "Diffusion Model as a New Domain Adapter", Nanjing University, Dec. 2024
  • "Wide Field of View (FoV) Computer Vision", UT Austin, Apr. 2022
  • "Wide Field of View (FoV) Computer Vision and Beyond", BJTU, May. 2022
  • "Towards Complete Scene and Regular Shape for Distortion Rectification by Curve-Aware Extrapolation", Graduate academic forum of Chinese Journal of Image and Graphics, Sep. 2021