UP Lab

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Xiatian Zhu, a Reader (Associate Professor) affiliated with the Surrey Institute for People-Centred Artificial Intelligence and the Centre for Vision, Speech and Signal Processing (CVSSP) at the University of Surrey in Guildford, UK, leads the Universal Perception (UP) Lab. Previously a research scientist at Samsung AI Centre, Cambridge, UK, He holds a Ph.D. from the Queen Mary University of London. He serves as an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Multimedia (TMM) and Action Editor for Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR). He also serves/served as an Area Chair of top conferences such as CVPR, ICCV, NeurIPS, and ICLR. He is a member of EPSRC’s Peer Review College, and an IEEE Senior Member.

Physical Spacetime AI for a People-Centred World: The UP Lab is dedicated to advancing physical spacetime AI — building world models that perceive, generate, and reason about the physical world across space, time, and physical law. We model diverse data and observations, such as images, videos, audio, text, point cloud, LiDAR, radar, X-ray, hyperspectral images, and remote sensing, to capture not just how scenes appear but how they are structured in 3D, how they evolve over time, and how they behave according to physical principles. Our applications span a wide range of domains, such as creative media, fashion design, healthcare, climate science, finance, cybersecurity, chemical engineering, sports, gaming, and social issues. Guided by our principle of putting people at the heart of AI, we prioritise the ethical development and integration of AI capabilities with real-world application norms, emphasising sustainable and responsible AI innovation and practice. This ensures our AI initiatives are grounded in community needs and values, aiming to develop transformative technologies that positively impact society and enhance the wellbeing of people and communities.

News

Jun 18, 2026 3 ECCV papers accepted
May 18, 2026 Awarded EuroHPC GPU access
May 13, 2026 Awarded as ICML Silver Reviewer
May 7, 2026 1 ICML paper accepted
Mar 10, 2026 Awarded GPU access of 10,000 hours to the AI Research Resource (AIRR) advanced supercomputers
Mar 9, 2026 Serving for UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) EPSRC’s Reer Review College
Mar 6, 2026 Serving as Action Editor for Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR)
Feb 23, 2026 3 CVPR and 2 CVPR Findings track papers accepted
Jan 26, 2026 3 ICLR papers accepted
Oct 16, 2025 Welcome Mr. Xuanya Zhu joining us as a fresh PhD student
Sep 18, 2025 3 NeurIPS papers accepted
Sep 6, 2025 Winners for both CBCT imagery segmentation and interactive segmentation tasks of the ToothFairy3 Challenge, MICCAI 2025. Team: Zhi Qin Tan, Xiatian Zhu, Owen Addison, Yunpeng Li
Sep 2, 2025 Serving as Area Chair for The IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2026
Aug 28, 2025 Serving as Oral Session Chair for IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) 2025
Aug 16, 2025 Serving as Area Chair for The Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2026

Recent publications

  1. ICML
    From Imagined Futures to Executable Actions: Mixture of Latent Actions for Robot Manipulation
    Yajie Li, Bozhou Zhang, Chun Gu, Zipei Ma, Jiahui Zhang, Jiankang Deng,  Xiatian Zhu, and Li Zhang
    In Forty-third International Conference on Machine Learning 2026
  2. CVPR
    RAID: Retrieval-Augmented Anomaly Detection
    Mingxiu Cai, Zhe Zhang, Gaochang Wu, Tianyou Chai, and Xiatian Zhu
    In Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2026
  3. CVPR (Highlight)
    EthoCLIP: Ontology-Enhanced Video-Language Pretraining for Animal Behavior Understanding
    Yinuo Jing, Jinyan Wu, Zixi Yang, Kongming Liang,  Xiatian Zhu, and Zhanyu Ma
    In Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2026
  4. CVPR
    SGDrive: Scene-to-Goal Hierarchical World Cognition for Autonomous Driving
    Jingyu Li, Junjie Wu, Dongnan Hu, Xiangkai Huang, Bin Sun, Zhihui Hao, Xianpeng Lang,  Xiatian Zhu, and Li Zhang
    In Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2026
  5. CVPR-F
    SCOPE: Scene-Contextualized Incremental Few-Shot 3D Segmentation
    Vishal Thengane, Zhaochong An, Tianjin Huang, Son Lam Phung, Abdesselam Bouzerdoum, Lu Yin, Na Zhao, and Xiatian Zhu
    In Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (Findings Track) 2026
  6. CVPR-F
    See Tomorrow, Act Today: Foresight-Driven Autonomous Driving
    Bozhou Zhang, Nan Song, Yuang Wang, Jiankang Deng,  Xiatian Zhu, and Li Zhang
    In Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (Findings Track) 2026
  7. ICLR
    MergeTune: Continued fine-tuning of vision-language models
    Wenqing Wang, Da Li,  Xiatian Zhu, and Josef Kittler
    In Proceedings of International Conference on Learning Representations 2026
  8. ICLR
    Consistent text-to-image generation via scene de-contextualization
    Song Tang, Peihao Gong, Kunyu Li, Kai Guo, Boyu Wang, Mao Ye, Jianwei Zhang, and Xiatian Zhu
    In Proceedings of International Conference on Learning Representations 2026
  9. ICLR
    Dynamic Novel View Synthesis in High Dynamic Range
    Kaixuan Zhang, Zhipeng Xiong, Minxian Li, Mingwu Ren, Jiankang Deng, and Xiatian Zhu
    In Proceedings of International Conference on Learning Representations 2026