Hi, I am Chengxuan Qian (钱承炫), an incoming CS PhD student at University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), advised by Prof. Yao Qin. Prior to that, I'm grateful for the mentorship of Prof. Zhengzhong Tu (TAMU), Prof. Yue Zhao (USC), and Prof. Han Liu (Northwestern University) during my undergraduate years.
My research focuses on identifying and eliminating barriers to foundation models reaching superintelligence. Foundation models grow from large-scale, static, and idealized settings, yet the real world is dynamic and partially observable. Can they actively explore, interact with tools and environments, and connect with memory? Can they simulate world dynamics, imagine future states, and continually evolve from experience? I aim to teach machines to think like humans and explore frontiers beyond human reach.
🧭Research Interests
Multimodal Intelligence
DecAlign (ICLR 26), DynCIM (CVPRW 26), ProgressLM (ACL 26 Oral), AutoDrive-R2 (ICLR 26), Video-STAR (ICLR 26), CLIMD (MICCAI 25), fMRI-LM (CVPR 26), Re-Align (EMNLP 25 Main), ImagineAgent
Spatial Intelligence and World Modeling
Spatial Understanding and Mental Simulation (ACL 26 Oral), Dynamic Scene Generation (NeurIPS 25), Multi-View Stereo (IEEE TCSVT 25), What If Agents Could Imagine?
Real-World Adaptation, Robustness, and Generalization
Medical AI (BIBM AIBH 25, IEEE TMI 25, MICCAI 25, IEEE JBHI 25, CVPR 26), Autonomous Driving (ICLR 26), Video Understanding (ICLR 26), Embodied Robotics (ACL 26 Oral)
🔥News
- 2026.07: ✈️✈️ Attending ACL 2026 in-person from July 5-8, See you in San Diego! [Poster] [Oral Presentation] [Slides]
- 2026.06: ✈️✈️ Attending CVPR 2026 in-person from June 2-6, See you in Denver!
- 2026.05: 🏆🏆 Recognized as a CVPR 2026 Outstanding Reviewer, top 5% of 17,491 reviewers.
- 2026.05: 🏆🏆 Our work ProgressLM has been selected for an ACL 2026 Oral (Top 3.3%) 🔥
- 2026.04: 🎉🎉 ProgressLM, our general reward model for embodied agents, has been accepted to the ACL 2026 Main Conference and the ICLR 2026 Workshop on World Models!
- 2026.04: 🎉🎉 My first-author work DynCIM on cross-modal imbalance in multimodal foundation models has been accepted by CVPR 2026 Workshop on Cognitive Foundations for Multimodal Models!
- 2026.03: 🔥🔥 Joined University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) as a CS PhD student.
- 2026.02: 🎉🎉 We release What If Agents Could Imagine?, a study that breaks through the static perception barrier of VLMs via active generative world modeling.
- 2026.02: 🎉🎉 Our work fMRI-LM on Medical Foundation Models has been accepted by CVPR 2026!
- 2026.01: 🎉🎉 Three first/co-first author papers have been accepted by ICLR 2026!
- DecAlign: Aligning Cross-Modal Semantics for Multimodal Foundation Models
- AutoDrive-R²: Towards Physical-Grounded Multimodal Reasoning for Autonomous Driving
- Video-STAR: Tool-Augmented Agentic RL for Thinking with Videos
- 2026.01: 🎉🎉 We propose ProgressLM, which further investigates whether VLMs can acquire human-like, generalizable mental understanding and simulation in embodied scenarios from a single example, and serves as an early step toward building general-purpose reward models. See More: [Website] [Paper] [Code] [Model] [Dataset]
- 2025.12: ✈️✈️ Attended NeurIPS 2025 in-person, See you in San Diego!
- 2025.11: 🎉🎉 Our work LiMT, an unified multi-task liver image benchmark work, has been accepted by Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics (JBHI)!
- 2025.10: 🎉🎉 Our work DVP-MVS++, Synergize Depth-Normal-Edge and Harmonized Visibility Prior for Multi-View Stereo, has been accepted by IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology (IEEE TCSVT)!
- 2025.10: 🎉🎉 My first-author work on Medical Segmentation under sparse and noisy labeled annotations has been accepted by BIBM AIBH 2025!
- 2025.10: 🎉🎉 We propose Video-STAR, a powerful Tool-Augmented Agentic RL approach for Thinking with Videos. On open-vocabulary action recognition benchmarks like K-400 and HMDB-51, our 3B VLM achieves nearly 40% accuracy improvement over base models!🔥
- 2025.09: 🎉🎉 Our work HAIF-GS, Hierarchical and Induced Flow-Guided Gaussian Splatting for Dynamic Scene, has been accepted by NeurIPS 2025!
- 2025.09: 🎉🎉 We propose AutoDrive-R², Incentivizing Reasoning and Self-Reflection Capacity for VLA Model in Autonomous Driving. We're also honored that our work was featured by AutoDrive Heart (自动驾驶之心)!
- 2025.08: 🎉🎉 Our work Re-Align has been accepted by EMNLP 2025 Main Conference!
- 2025.07: 🎉🎉 Our work on Generalizable Medical Vision has been Accepted by IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging.
- 2025.06: ✈️✈️ Attended CVPR 2025 in-person, See you in Nashville!
- 2025.05: 🎉🎉 Our work CLIMD has been Early Accepted by MICCAI 2025 (Top 9%).
- 2025.03: 🎉🎉 Excited to propose my first-author work DecAlign, a novel cross-modal decoupling and alignment framwork for multimodal representation learning.
- 2025.02: ✈️✈️ Attended AAAI 2025 in-person, See you in Philadelphia!
- 2024.11: 🎉🎉 Excited to propose my first-author work DynCIM, a novel dynamic multimodal curriculum learning framework in addressing cross-modal competition and imbalances, which is now available on ArXiv!
- 2024.10: 🎉🎉 We propose FASS, a novel frequency domain-enhanced approach for Medical Image Segmentation under Low-Contrast environment.
📝 Selected Publications (For the full list, please see Google Scholar)
DecAlign: Hierarchical Cross-Modal Alignment for Decoupled Multimodal Representation Learning
Multimodal Alignment Foundation Model Interpretability
ICLR 2026
Chengxuan Qian, Shuo Xing, Shawn Li, Yue Zhao, Zhengzhong Tu†.
ProgressLM: Towards Progress Reasoning in Vision-Language Models
Spatial Intelligence Embodied Robotics Data-Centric Multimodal Reasoning Open-World Applications
Website Paper Code Model Dataset
ACL 2026 (Oral, Top 3.3%)
ICLR 2026 Workshop on World Models
Jianshu Zhang*, Chengxuan Qian*, Haosen Sun, Haoran Lu, Dingcheng Wang, Letian Xue, Han Liu
Multimodal Reasoning Autonomous Driving Open-World Applications
Featured by AutoDrive Heart (自动驾驶之心)
ICLR 2026
Zhenlong Yuan*, Chengxuan Qian*, Jing Tang, Jinguo Luo, Rui Chen, Lei Sun, Xiangxiang Chu, Yujun Cai, Dapeng Zhang, Shuo Li.
Video-STAR: Reinforcing Open-Vocabulary Action Recognition with Tools
Think with Videos Tool-Using Agent Multi-turn Agentic RL
Paper Code 3B Model 7B Model Dataset
ICLR 2026
Zhenlong Yuan*, Xiangyan Qu*, Chengxuan Qian*, Rui Chen, Jing Tang, Lei Sun, Xiangxiang Chu, Dapeng Zhang, Yiwei Wang, Yujun Cai, Shuo Li.
🏆 Selected Honors & Awards
- ACL Oral Presentation (Top 3.3%), 2026
- CVPR Outstanding Reviewer (Top 5% of 17,491), 2026
- Fellowship, Department of Computer Science, UCSB, 2026
- Outstanding Graduate Award (Top 6.6%), Jiangsu University, 2026
- Research Rising Star Award ($2500), Arcadia University, 2025
- Excellent Academic Scholarship ($48,000), Arcadia University, 2024
- National-Level College Students’ Innovation and Entrepreneurship Funded Program (¥8000), 2023
- First-class Academic Scholarship (Top 3%), Jiangsu University (¥3000), 2023, 2024
🎙️ Invited Talks
🎖 Academic Services
- Journal Reviewer: IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology (TCSVT), IEEE Transactions on Multimedia (TMM), Pattern Recognition (PR), IEEE Transactions on Robot Learning (T-RL), ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR), IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics (JBHI).
- Conference Reviewer: ICME 2025-2026, AAAI 2026-2027, ICASSP 2026, CVPR 2026, NeurIPS 2026.
- Workshop Reviewer: ACL 2025 SRW, NeurIPS 2025 Imageomics, NeurIPS 2025 Efficient Reasoning, ICLR 2026 Workshop on Lifelong Agents, ICLR 2026 Workshop World Models, COLM 2026 Workshop Efficient Reasoning.
🌟 Misc
Outside of research, I enjoy Photography📹, swimming🏊, biking🚴, billiards🎱, table tennis🏓. I strive to stay energetic every day and maintain a strong sense of passion for both academic research and life.
