Chen Wei

I am a Member of Technical Staff at AMI Labs and an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Rice University (on leave).

I completed my Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins University, advised by Bloomberg Distinguished Professor Alan L. Yuille. After my PhD, I joined Meta FAIR as a postdoctoral researcher. During my doctoral studies, I also interned at Google DeepMind and Meta FAIR. I received my B.S. with honors from Peking University EECS.

I am not recruiting Ph.D. students for Fall 2027.

Research

My research asks: how can AI learn to see, reason about, and act in the visual world with minimal supervision? I approach this from three angles:

Visual Representation Learning: building foundational visual encoders (iBOT, MaskFeat, Perception Encoder) that power downstream perception at scale.
Generative World Models: using generative models not just to create, but to understand: learning representations from diffusion (DiffMAE, De-Diffusion, DSR) and generating explorable worlds (GenEx).
Agentic Vision: enabling models to reason and act through vision, from game-based reasoning (Play to Generalize) to tool-augmented visual agents (PyVision, PyVision-RL).

News

2026 Serving as Area Chair for NeurIPS 2026 and ICLR 2026.
2026 Congratulations to Shitian Zhao and Yunfei Xie — PyVision-RL and MEMO accepted to ICML 2026!
2026 Co-organizing the CVPR 2026 Workshop on World Models Meet Active Sensing and Closed-Loop Planning.
2026 Selected as an AAAI New Faculty Highlight.
2026 Congratulations to Yunfei Xie — Play to Generalize accepted to ICLR 2026!
2025 Perception Encoder accepted to NeurIPS 2025 as Oral presentation.
2025 Congratulations to Yunfei Xie for receiving the Lambda Research Grant ($10,000) for his work on Play to Generalize.

Blog

with Yifei Wang and Xiaoyu Wu · June 2026 · generative model evaluation

EMA: A Quiet Hyperparameter That Moves Diffusion Leaderboards

We examine exponential moving average (EMA), an often overlooked hyperparameter, in recent speed-run image diffusion benchmarks. A seemingly small experimental detail can change how benchmark results and model rankings should be interpreted.

Selected Publications

Platonic representation view linking robot observations and motion trajectories

Sensorimotor Alignment: A Platonic Proxy for Embodied Policy Success
Yunfei Xie, Howard H. Qian, Shiyi Lan, Kaiyu Hang, Chen Wei
arXiv preprint, 2026
arXiv / project page / code

Internet human demonstration clips used by RoboTok

RoboTok: A Scalable Data Engine for Internet Demonstration Video Retrieval and Dexterous Manipulation Learning
Howard Qian, Yiting Chen, Yunfei Xie, Kejia Ren, Podshara Chanrungmaneekul, Gaotian Wang, Bowen Wen, Chen Wei, Kaiyu Hang
arXiv preprint, 2026
arXiv / project page / code / data and models

Taming Outlier Tokens in Diffusion Transformers
Xiaoyu Wu*, Yifei Wang*, Tsu-Jui Fu, Liang-Chieh Chen, Zhe Gan, Chen Wei
arXiv preprint, 2026
arXiv / project page / code

MEMO: Memory-Augmented Model Context Optimization for Robust Multi-Turn Multi-Agent LLM Games
Yunfei Xie, Kevin Wang, Bobby Cheng, Jianzhu Yao, Zhizhou Sha, Alexander Duffy, Yihan Xi, Hongyuan Mei, Cheston Tan, Chen Wei, Pramod Viswanath, Zhangyang Wang
ICML, 2026
arXiv / project page / code

Play to Generalize: Learning to Reason Through Game Play
Yunfei Xie, Yinsong Ma, Shiyi Lan, Alan Yuille, Junfei Xiao, Chen Wei
ICLR, 2026
arXiv / project page / code

PyVision-RL: Forging Open Agentic Vision Models via RL
Shitian Zhao, Shaoheng Lin, Ming Li, Haoquan Zhang, Wenshuo Peng, Kaipeng Zhang†, Chen Wei†
ICML, 2026
arXiv / project page / code

PyVision: Agentic Vision with Dynamic Tooling
Shitian Zhao, Haoquan Zhang, Shaoheng Lin, Ming Li, Qilong Wu, Kaipeng Zhang†, Chen Wei†
NeurIPS 2025 Workshop on Multi-Turn Interactions in LLMs
arXiv / project page / code

GenEx: Generating an Explorable World
Taiming Lu, Tianmin Shu, Junfei Xiao, Luoxin Ye, Jiahao Wang, Cheng Peng, Chen Wei, Daniel Khashabi, Rama Chellappa, Alan Yuille, Jieneng Chen
ICLR, 2025
arXiv / genex.world / code

De-Diffusion Makes Text a Strong Cross-Modal Interface
Chen Wei, Chenxi Liu, Siyuan Qiao, Zhishuai Zhang, Alan Yuille, Jiahui Yu
CVPR, 2024
arXiv / project page

Diffusion Models as Masked Autoencoders
Chen Wei, Karttikeya Mangalam, Po-Yao Huang, Yanghao Li, Haoqi Fan, Hu Xu, Huiyu Wang, Cihang Xie, Alan Yuille, Christoph Feichtenhofer
ICCV, 2023
arXiv / project page / press

Masked Feature Prediction for Self-Supervised Visual Pre-Training
Chen Wei*, Haoqi Fan, Saining Xie, Chao-Yuan Wu, Alan Yuille, Christoph Feichtenhofer*
CVPR, 2022
arXiv / code / Most Influential CVPR 2023 Papers

iBOT: Image BERT Pre-Training with Online Tokenizer
Jinghao Zhou, Chen Wei, Huiyu Wang, Wei Shen, Cihang Xie, Alan Yuille, Tao Kong
ICLR, 2022
arXiv / code / press / Improved and scaled up to DINOv2 by Meta AI.