Guanxiong Chen

I am a PhD student from the IMAGER Lab at UBC Computer Science, fortunately under the supervision of Prof. Dinesh K. Pai, and co-supervision of Prof. David I. W. Levin. My research focuses at the intersection of computer graphics, AI and robotics. Specifically, I aim to leverage high-fidelity, AI-enhanced physics-based simulation to enable roboticists to build more accurate models of the physical world, design more effective algorithms for robotic manipulation of deformable objects, and biomechanists to better understand human motion.

I also led discussions for the Sensorimotor Reading and Thinking Reading Group. Our topics of interest include differentiable physics, biomechanics, RL-based character control and large-scale datasets of human motion, shape, etc.

Previously I worked as a summer research student under the supervision of Prof. Ian Mitchell at UBC Laboratory of Computational Intelligence, where I built ROS-X-Habitat, a software tool that bridges ROS-based agents with Habitat Sim. The tool was selected and adapted by AIR/DJI as the infrastructure for Robomaster Sim2Real Challenge (RMUS) 2022, 2023 and used by over 100 teams. [offical site] [press coverage]

Email / CV / Google Scholar / LinkedIn / Github

Education

PhD in Computer Science, UBC, 2024 - 2028 (expected)
Master of Science in Computer Science, UBC, 2021 - 2024
Bachelor of Applied Science in Computer Engineering, UBC, 2015 - 2021

Publications

My current research focus is modelling, simulation and manipulation of soft bodies, specifically fabrics. In the past, I worked on biomechanical simulation in my Master's degree with Prof. Pai, and mobile robot simulation in my undergrad with Prof. Mitchell. I also worked on educational robotics with Dr. Soheil Kianzad and Prof. Karon MacLean. Representative papers are highlighted.

	The Effective Inertia of the Lower Limb During Locomotion Guanxiong Chen, Bastian Wandt, Helge Rhodin, Dinesh K. Pai BioRXiv preprint, 2025 [BioRXiv]
	Learning Simulatable Models of Cloth with Spatially-varying Constitutive Properties Guanxiong Chen, Shashwat Suri, Yuhao Wu, Etienne Vouga, David I.W. Levin, Dinesh K. Pai ArXiv preprint, 2025 [ArXiv]
	Completeness and Coherence Learning for Fast Arbitrary Style Transfer Zhijie Wu, Chunjin Song, Guanxiong Chen, Sheng Guo, Weilin Huang Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR), 2022 [OpenReview]
	ROS-X-Habitat: Bridging the ROS Ecosystem with Embodied AI Guanxiong Chen, Haoyu Yang, Ian M. Mitchell 19th Conference on Robots and Vision (CRV), 2022 [paper] [code] [press]
	PAL: A Framework for Physically Assisted Learning Through Design and Exploration With a Haptic Robot Buddy Soheil Kianzad, Guanxiong Chen, Karon MacLean Frontiers in Robotics and AI 2021 [paper]

Awards

NSERC Canada Graduate Scholarships – Master’s program, 2021
NSERC Undergraduate Student Research Award, 2021, 2019
Jim and Helen Hill Memorial Service Award, 2019
Trek Excellence Scholarship, 2017
Chancellor’s Scholar Award, 2015

This website was adapted from Jon Baron's personal website hosted here.