Zijun Cui | CS PhD Student @ UT Dallas

Zijun Cui

I am a PhD student in Computer Science at the University of Texas at Dallas (starting June 2026). I am fortunate to be supervised by Prof. Yapeng Tian at the Computer Vision and Multimodal Computing (CVMC) Lab. My research interests lie in Physical AI, with a focus on Audio-Visual Perception & Generation.

I am really fortunate to have collaborated with Dr. Xiulong Liu. Previously, I received my M.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from University of Washington, advised by Eli Shlizerman. Before UW, I was very lucky to collaborate with Prof. Zhaopeng Cui's research group at State Key Laboratory of CAD&CG at Zhejiang University.

My full name is pronounced as /ziˈdʒʊn tsweɪ/, with the “C” in Cui sounding like “ts”.

I am actively seeking research opportunities. Feel free to email me if you would like to collaborate!

Email: [email protected]

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News

[Sep. 2025] Two papers accepted to NeurIPS 2026, with one spotlight and one poster!
[Aug. 2026] Invited Talk at Video Generation & Reasoning Journal Club.
[Jun. 2026] Joined UT Dallas CS as a PhD student, supervised by Prof. Yapeng Tian.
[Apr. 2026] Graduated with M.S. Degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Washington.
[Sep. 2025] One first co-author paper accepted to NeurIPS 2025 as Oral presentation (0.36% acceptance rate)!
[Jan. 2025] Joined the NeuroAI Lab at UW, working with Prof. Eli Shlizerman on audio-visual research.
[Sep. 2024] Joined ECE department at University of Washington, Seattle, as a master student.
[Jun. 2024] Received Bachelor of Engineering degree from Zhejiang University.

Research

	Do Joint Audio-Video Generation Models Understand Physics? Zijun Cui^, Xiulong Liu^, Hao Fang^, Mingwei Xu, Jiageng Liu, Zexin Xu, Weiguo Pian, Shijian Deng, Feiyu Du, Chenming Ge, Yapeng Tian Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS Dataset)*, 2026 (poster) webpage / arxiv / dataset / code / bibtex
	SceneBind: Binding What and Where Across Vision, Audio and Language Mingfei Chen, Zijun Cui, Ruoke Zhang, Hyeonggon Ryu, Eli Shlizerman Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2026 (Spotlight) webpage / arxiv / demo / bibtex
	SAVVY: Spatial Awareness via Audio-Visual LLMs through Seeing and Hearing Mingfei Chen^, Zijun Cui^, Xiulong Liu^, Jinlin Xiang, Caleb Zheng, Jingyuan Li, Eli Shlizerman Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS)*, 2025 (Oral) webpage / demo / github / bibtex

Education

2026.06 -	Ph.D. in Computer Science, University of Texas at Dallas, United States. Yapeng Tian, Computer Vision and Multimodal Computing (CVMC) Lab.
2024.09 - 2026.04	M.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle, United States.
2020.09 - 2024.06	B.Eng. in Electrical Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China.