Portrait of Tianjun Gu

M.S. Student · Spatial Intelligence

Tianjun (Grady) Gu

I study how multimodal agents perceive, remember, and reason about spatially and dynamically evolving worlds.

I am a master's student at East China Normal University, advised by Prof. Lizhuang Ma and Prof. Xin Tan. I am currently a visiting research intern with the NYU AI4CE Lab and Tsinghua University Spatial Intelligence Lab.

My research focuses on spatial intelligence, long-form video understanding, world models, and embodied AI, with an emphasis on structured spatial reasoning, memory, and reliable decision-making in open-world environments.

News

Recent updates

  1. Started visiting research at NYU's Center for Robotics and Embodied Intelligence, working with Prof. Chen Feng and the AI4CE Lab.

  2. Towards Spatial Supersensing in the Wild was accepted to ECCV 2026.

  3. Joined Meituan's Infrastructure R&D Platform / M17 as a Foundation Model Research Intern.

  4. Joined Tsinghua University Spatial Intelligence Lab as a visiting research intern.

Research

Selected publications

Representative work in spatial reasoning, video understanding, and embodied intelligence. * denotes equal contribution.

Additional publications

Visual Intelligence · 3:27

Efficient Multimodal Large Language Models: A Survey

Yizhang Jin*, Jian Li*, Tianjun Gu*, Yexin Liu, Bo Zhao, Jinxiang Lai, Zhenye Gan, Yabiao Wang, Chengjie Wang, Xin Tan, Lizhuang Ma

Paper

ICCV 2025 · Poster

From Enhancement to Understanding: Build a Generalized Bridge for Low-light Vision via Semantically Consistent Unsupervised Fine-tuning

Sen Wang, Shao Zeng, Tianjun Gu, Zhizhong Zhang, Ruixin Zhang, Shouhong Ding, Jingyun Zhang, Jun Wang, Xin Tan, Yuan Xie, Lizhuang Ma

Paper

Journal of Graphics · 45(1):102

Diversified Generation of Theatrical Masks Based on SASGAN

Tianjun Gu, Suya Xiong, Xiao Lin

DOI

Experience

Research & industry

Research remains the main thread, supported by experience in foundation-model training, data engines, and deployed vision systems.

Research experience

Visiting Research Intern

NYU Center for Robotics and Embodied Intelligence (CREO) · AI4CE Lab

Advisor: Chen Feng · NYU Tandon School of Engineering

  • Investigating spatial representation learning for MLLMs by testing whether complementary multi-view, panoramic, and egocentric observations yield more viewpoint-consistent scene representations and improve cross-view grounding and spatial reasoning.

Visiting Research Intern

Tsinghua University Spatial Intelligence Lab · Beijing, China

Advisor: Yiming Li

  • First-authored Towards Spatial Supersensing in the Wild (ECCV 2026), introducing VSI-Super-Wild, a four-task benchmark for continual agent-object-environment world-state reasoning with 442 videos (284.52 hours) and 6,980 human-verified QA pairs; evaluated 13 MLLMs and found average performance drop from 35.0 on 0-10-minute videos to 26.3 beyond 120 minutes.
  • Contributed to additional collaborative projects on generalist agents and foundation-model evaluation, including Towards Generalist Game Players: An Investigation of Foundation Models in the Game Multiverse.

Graduate Researcher

Digital Media & Computer Vision Lab (DMCV) · Shanghai, China

SJTU–ECNU Joint Lab · Advisors: Lizhuang Ma and Xin Tan

  • Developed DORAEMON, a zero-shot navigation framework with hierarchical semantic-spatial and topological memory and safety-aware VLM planning; achieved state-of-the-art SR and SPL on HM3D, MP3D, and GOAT.
  • Contributed to national-level, municipal, and industry-sponsored research programs on embodied intelligence, autonomous driving, agent evaluation and safety, and AI-enabled social simulation.

Industry experience

Foundation Model Research Intern

Meituan · Infrastructure R&D Platform / M17 · Shanghai, China

  • Improved LongCat-Flash-3B's omni-modal capabilities, focusing on multilingual instruction following through targeted data construction, supervised post-training, and systematic evaluation.
  • Built an end-to-end GUI-agent data engine for LongCat-Flash, converting web-sourced videos into interaction trajectories and training data across generation, quality control, and model post-training.
  • Developed reinforcement-learning schemes for interactive multimodal models spanning audio-visual and spoken interaction, covering task construction, reward design, and multi-turn policy optimization; also explored interactive world models through benchmark and memory-oriented evaluation design.

Research Intern

Tencent Youtu Lab · Shanghai, China

  • Led SESB (under review), an inference-time spatial memory with query-relevant belief access, targeted video retrieval, and local updates; achieved 87.1 on VSI-Bench, versus 50.8 with static belief and 59.9 under the same frame budget.
  • Led the EscherVerse study (Nature Communications, Revision), building the dataset from 11,328 videos, with an 8,000-example benchmark and a 35,963-example instruction-tuning set.
  • Explored autonomous research agents and automated research workflows, and supported post-training of Youtu foundation models through data construction, training-pipeline development, and evaluation.

AIGC Multi-Model Algorithm Intern

Baidu · MEG / Library Strategy Group · Shanghai, China

  • Built scenario- and character-specific LoRA datasets and fine-tuned image-generation models, improving animated-character consistency by 38 percentage points.
  • Developed automated multi-character LoRA training pipelines and supported the production launch of Baidu Wenku's one-sentence comic feature.

Machine Vision Algorithm Engineer

SAIC Anji Intelligent IoT Technology Co., Ltd. · Shanghai, China

  • Built cross-site warehouse vision datasets using CenterNet-based candidate mining, similarity filtering, and end-to-end preprocessing pipelines.
  • Trained and deployed workwear-detection models across multiple warehouse sites, iterating through on-site evaluation, error analysis, and operational feedback.

Education

East China Normal University

M.S. · GPA 91/100 (3.8/4.0) · Rank 1 in cohort

Advisors: Lizhuang Ma and Xin Tan · Shanghai, China

First-Class Scholarship

Shanghai Normal University

B.S. · GPA 92/100 (3.9/4.0)

Shanghai, China

First-Class Scholarship

Academic service

Reviewer

NeurIPS · ECCV

Conference Volunteer

CCF CAD/CG

Contact

Research conversations are always welcome.

I am actively seeking Fall 2027 PhD opportunities and remain open to research collaborations and aligned research internships.

TianjunGu_Grady@outlook.com