WorldEngine AI
2026 · Santa Clara, CAResearch Intern
Jionghao Wang
Currently looking for full-time/internship opportunities.
I am a 3rd-year Ph.D. student at Texas A&M University, supervised by Prof. Wenping Wang and Prof. Xin Li. I also work closely with Prof. Yue Wang. People call me John.
I am passionate about bringing intelligence to the real world, through Robot Foundation Models, Physics-based Motion, and 3D Real-to-Sim.
Previously, I obtained my B.Eng. and M.Eng. degrees from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, where I was fortunate to be supervised by Prof. Li Song.
Publications (robotics first, then 3D; * equal contribution)
Flex-RSI: Benchmarking Recursive Self-Improvement of Frontier Agents
A budget-aware benchmark where agents rewrite their own harness between rounds to improve at a task. We ran 18 frontier models on 24 vision and robotics tasks to see where self-improvement pays off.
Steerable Humanoid Loco-Manipulation VLA
In Submission
A humanoid policy steered by future goal images: a predictor turns subtask prompts into goal images, and a planner drives whole-body actions toward them across multi-task routines.
DiTaR: Disentangling Task-Relevant Latent Dynamics for Reward Modeling
We learn dense rewards from action-free videos by modeling task-relevant latent dynamics, so the reward tracks task progress rather than visual distractors such as lighting.
Learning What Matters: Adaptive Information Theoretic Objectives for Robot Exploration
Developed QOED to enhance robot exploration by isolating identifiable model parameters and suppressing unidentifiable 'nuisance' directions in high-dimensional systems.
PDT: Point Distribution Transformation with Diffusion Models
PDT is a novel diffusion-based framework for transforming dense point distribution into a target distribution that is semantically meaningful.
Disentangled Clothed Avatar Generation from Text Descriptions
In this paper, we introduced a novel text-to-avatar generation method that separately generates the human body and the clothes and allows high-quality animation on the generated avatar.
360-Degree Panorama Generation from Few Unregistered NFoV Images
We proposed a novel diffusion-based pipeline that generates complete 360 panoramas using one or more unregistered NFoV images captured from arbitrary angles.
SPGen: Spherical Projection as Consistent and Flexible Representation for Single Image 3D Shape Generation
SPGen leverages Spherical Projection (SP) to generate high-quality 3D shapes with diffusion models.
News
- NOV 2026 Released Flex-RSI, a benchmark for recursive self-improvement of frontier agents! 🤖
- MAY 2026 Started as a research intern at WorldEngine AI! 🌍
- AUG 2025 Wrapped up my amazing time with Sony, then presented at SIGGRAPH 2025 in Vancouver, Canada! 🇨🇦
- MAY 2025 Started as a research intern at Sony in San Jose, CA! 🎮
- OCT 2024 Attended ECCV 2024 in Milan, Italy! 🇮🇹
- AUG 2024 Started as a Ph.D. student at Texas A&M! Gig 'em! 🎓
- JUL 2024 SO-SMPL is accepted by ECCV 2024. Thanks to all collaborators! 🎉
- MAR 2024 Obtained my Master's degree from SJTU! Grateful for the amazing time! 🎓
- FEB 2024 Started as a research intern at miHoYo in Shanghai! ✨
Internships
Sony Corporation of America
2025 · San Jose, CAResearch Intern
miHoYo (HoYoverse)
2024 · Shanghai, CNResearch Intern
Intel Asia Pacific Development
2021 · Shanghai, CNMedia Graphics Software Engineering Intern
Teaching
CSCE 611 Operating Systems
CSCE 671 Human-Computer Interaction
VIST 172/173 Foundations of Visual Computing I & II
VIST 272 Visual Computing
Misc
I love comedy, sports, music, history, and cinema.