Ziyang Xie
Startup Founder, AI Hacker Cofounder, CTO @ Braintrance
Computer Science Phd dropout @ UCLA | MSCS @ UIUC
B.S. in CS @ Fudan University
My mission is to solve physical world problems with AI and build innovative products that augment human intelligence rather than replace us.
I’m the Co-Founder & CTO of Braintrance, building a next-generation immersive media platform that brings 4D spatial content to everyone. Before Braintrance, I co-founded Manifolds-AI, a 3D native GenAI platform for e-commerce content creation.
Previously, I studied CS at UCLA (advised by Prof. Bolei Zhou). I received my Master’s degree (MSCS) from UIUC, where I worked closely with Prof. Yuxiong Wang and Prof. Shenlong Wang. I completed my undergraduate studies at Fudan University with Prof. Li Zhang.
My work spans 3D vision, simulation, generative models, and intelligent systems that interact with the physical world.
Thesis
- Master Thesis: Build Realistic and Interactive 3D Scene Simulation from In-the-wild Videos, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, 2025.
News
| Feb 27, 2025 | One new paper accepted by CVPR 2025 |
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| Feb 6, 2025 | One new paper accepted by TPAMI (IF 20.8) as Regular Paper. |
| May 5, 2024 | This summer, I will be joining Prof. Bolei Zhou’s group at UCLA as a research intern. |
| Jan 16, 2024 | One new paper accepted for ICLR 2024 Spotlight Presentation! 🎉 |
| Oct 30, 2023 | Glad to be invited to serve as a reviewer for CVPR 2024! |
Projects
WorldGen is a powerful AI model that creates interactive 3D scenes from text and image inputs in seconds. It supports instant 3D generation from text or image and 360° free exploration with loop closure.
Publications
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Vid2Sim: Realistic and Interactive Simulation from Video for Urban NavigationCVPR, 2025
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Experience
Cofounder & CTO
Dec. 2025 – Present
Tech-Founder & CTO
Sep. 2023 – Oct. 2025
Autonomous Driving Research Intern
Jan. 2022 – Jul. 2022
Education
CS PhD Student
Sep. 2025 – Apr 2026
Master of Science in Computer Science (MSCS)
Aug. 2023 – May 2025
Bachelor of Science in Computer Science
Sep. 2019 – June 2023
