Yang Fei费阳

I am an incoming Ph.D. student in Computer Science at the University of Toronto, advised by Prof. Sanja Fidler. I studied Computer Science and Mathematics at HKUST and was an exchange student at the University of Washington. During this time, I worked with Prof. Qifeng Chen and Prof. Ranjay Krishna.

My research goal is to build neural simulators for robotics: interactive, geometrically consistent, and physically grounded world models that enable embodied agents to predict consequences and plan before acting in the physical world. I currently study motion-centric video generation, with an emphasis on preserving structure and dynamics over time.

News

  1. I will join the University of Toronto as a Computer Science Ph.D. student, advised by Prof. Sanja Fidler.
  2. Our new preprint, “Structure from Tracking” (first author), is now available. See the project page.
  3. VideoVAE+ (co-first author) has been accepted to ICCV 2025. Code and weights are available here.
  4. Received the The Hong Kong, China – Asia-Pacific Scholarship.
  5. Started an exchange program at the University of Washington (Seattle).

Selected Publications

All publications

Structure From Tracking: Distilling Structure-Preserving Motion for Video Generation

Yang Fei, George Stoica, Jingyuan Liu, Qifeng Chen†, Ranjay Krishna*, Xiaojuan Wang*, Benlin Liu*†

Under Review

TL;DR: We introduce an algorithm to distill structure-preserving motion priors from an autoregressive video tracking model (SAM2) into a bidirectional video diffusion model.

Large Motion Video Autoencoding with Cross-modal Video VAE

Yazhou Xing*, Yang Fei*, Yingqing He*†, Jingye Chen, Jiaxin Xie, Xiaowei Chi, Qifeng Chen†

International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2025

TL;DR: We propose a video autoencoder that achieves high-fidelity video encoding by combining temporal-aware spatial compression, lightweight temporal compression, and textual guidance.

Education

University of Toronto

Ph.D. in Computer Science · Advisor: Prof. Sanja Fidler

Starting Sep 2026

University of Washington

Exchange Student, College of Engineering · GPA: 4.0 / 4.0

Jan – Mar 2025

Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

B.Sc. in Computer Science and Mathematics · GPA: 4.0 / 4.3 · Top 2 in CS & Math

Sep 2022 – Jun 2026

Selected Honors

  • Kerry Holdings Limited UROP AwardFirst Runner-Up · 2026
  • HKSAR Government ScholarshipTop 1% · 2023 – 2026
  • The Hong Kong, China – Asia-Pacific Scholarship2025