About me

I received the PhD degree in Computer Science from the City University of Hong Kong (CityU), under supervision of Rynson Lau and Antoni Chan. I obtained the BEng and MEng degrees in Software Engineering from Northeastern University (China). I was an intern at Microsoft Research Aisa (MSRA). I was a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Computer Science at the CityU.

Research

My primary research interest is Design Intelligence, which aims to answer a challenging question: how can computers learn to understand and generate desgins, and augment humans in the creative process? I am particularly interested in building design perceptive and generative models, and exploring their applications in various fields, e.g., visual design, filmmaking, animation, robotics.

Publications

	Towards Storytelling Animations: Joint Synthesis of Human and Camera Motions Boyuan Cheng, Yingjie Xi, Rui He, Jinhe Na, Ying Cao, Pengjie Wang, Jian Jun Zhang, Xiaosong Yang CVPR 2026 [Paper] [Video]
	Harnessing Layered Graphic Designs with Real Intentions for Text-to-Design Generation Xinya Song, Bo Yang, Ying Cao Findings of CVPR 2026 [Paper] [Project]
	Taming High-Resolution Auxiliary G-buffers for Deep Supersampling of Rendered Content Pengjie Wang, Chengzhi Yuan, Jie Guo, Xiaosong Yang, Houjie Li, Ian Stephenson, Jian Chang, Ying Cao IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG), 2025 [Paper]
	Order Matters: Learning Element Ordering for Graphic Design Generation Bo Yang, Ying Cao ACM Transactions on Graphics, 2025 (SIGGRAPH 2025) [Paper] [Project]
	HieraFashDiff: Hierarchical Fashion Design with Multi-stage Diffusion Models Zhifeng Xie, Hao Li, Huiming Ding, Mengtian Li, Xinhan Di, Ying Cao AAAI 2025 [Paper] [Project]
	An Interactive System for Supporting Creative Exploration of Cinematic Composition Designs Rui He, Huaxin Wei, Ying Cao UIST 2024 [Paper] [Project]
	Cinemassist: An Intelligent Interactive System for Real-Time Cinematic Composition Design Rui He, Ying Cao, Johan F. Hoorn, Huaxin Wei CHI 2024 (Late-Breaking Work) [Paper]
	Learning Autonomous Viewpoint Adjustment from Human Demonstrations for Telemanipulation Ruixing Jia, Lei Yang, Ying Cao, Calvin Kalun Or, Wenping Wang, Jia Pan ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction, 2024 [Paper]
	Attentive and Contrastive Image Manipulation Localization with Boundary Guidance Wenxi Liu, Hao Zhang, Qing Zhang, Qi Li, Xiaoxiang Liu, Ying Cao IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, 2024 [Paper]
	Design Order Guided Visual Note Optimization Xiaotian Qiao, Ying Cao, Rynson W.H. Lau IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG), 2022 [Paper]
	Instance-aware Scene Layout Forecasting Xiaotian Qiao, Quanlong Zheng, Ying Cao, Rynson W.H. Lau International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV), 2022 [Paper]
	Object-level Scene Context Prediction Xiaotian Qiao, Quanlong Zheng, Ying Cao, Rynson W.H. Lau IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI), 2021 [Paper]
	Automatic Comic Generation with Stylistic Multi-page Layouts and Emotion-driven Balloon Generation Xin Yang, Zongliang Ma, Letian Yu, Ying Cao, Baocai Yin, Xiaopeng Wei, QiangZhang, Rynson W.H. Lau ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing Communications and Applications, 2021 [Paper]
	Night-time Scene Parsing with a Large Real Dataset Xin Tan, Ke Xu, Ying Cao, Yiheng Zhang, Lizhuang Ma, Rynson W.H. Lau IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 2021 [Paper]
	Weakly-Supervised Salient Object Detection With Saliency Bounding Boxes Yuxuan Liu, Pengjie Wang, Ying Cao, Zijian Liang, Rynson W.H. Lau IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 2021 [Paper]
	Selective Region-based Photo Color Adjustment for Graphic Designs Nanxuan Zhao, Quanlong Zheng, Jing Liao, Ying Cao, Hanspeter Pfister, Rynson W.H. Lau ACM Transactions on Graphics, 2021 (presented at SIGGRPAH 2021) [Paper] [Project]
	Tactile Sketch Saliency Jianbo Jiao, Ying Cao, Manfred Lau, Rynson W.H. Lau ACM Multimedia 2020 [Paper]
	Content-aware Generative Modeling of Graphic Design Layouts Xinru Zheng, Xiaotian Qiao, Ying Cao, Rynson W.H. Lau (Joint first authors) ACM Transactions on Graphics, 2019 (SIGGRAPH 2019)* [Paper] [Project]
	ButtonTips: Design Web Buttons with Suggestions Dawei Liu, Ying Cao, Rynson W.H. Lau, Antoni B. Chan ICME 2019 (Oral) [Paper] [Project]
	Tell Me Where I Am: Object-level Scene Context Prediction Xiaotian Qiao, Quanlong Zheng, Ying Cao, Rynson W.H. Lau CVPR 2019 (Oral) [Paper] [Project]
	Distraction-Aware Shadow Detection Quanlong Zheng, Xiaotian Qiao, Ying Cao, Rynson W.H. Lau CVPR 2019 [Paper] [Project]
	Modeling Fonts in Context: Font Prediction on Web Designs Nanxuan Zhao, Ying Cao, Rynson W.H. Lau Computer Graphics Forum (Proc. Pacific Graphics 2018) [Paper] [Project]
	Task-driven Webpage Saliency Quanlong Zheng, Jianbo Jiao, Ying Cao, Rynson W.H. Lau ECCV 2018 [Paper] [Project]
	Look Deeper into Depth: Monocular Depth Estimation with Semantic Booster and Attention-Driven Loss Jianbo Jiao, Ying Cao, Yibing Song, Rynson W.H. Lau ECCV 2018 [PDF][Project (coming soon)]
	What Characterizes Personalities of Graphic Designs? Nanxuan Zhao, Ying Cao, Rynson W.H. Lau ACM Transactions on Graphics, 2018 (SIGGRAPH 2018) [PDF] [Project]
	Mining Probabilistic Color Palettes for Summarizing Color Use in Artwork Collections Ying Cao, Antoni B. Chan, Rynson W.H. Lau SIGGRAPH Asia 2017 Symposium on Visualization [PDF] [Project]
	Directing User Attention via Visual Flow on Web Designs Xufang Pang, Ying Cao, Rynson W.H. Lau, Antoni B. Chan (Joint first authors) ACM Transactions on Graphics, 2016 (SIGGRAPH Asia 2016)* [PDF] [Project]
	DynamicManga: Animating Still Manga via Camera Movement Ying Cao, Xufang Pang, Antoni B. Chan, Rynson W.H. Lau IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, 2016 [PDF] [Project]
	A Robust Panel Extraction Method for Manga Xufang Pang, Ying Cao, Rynson W.H. Lau, Antoni B. Chan ACM Multimedia 2014 [PDF]
	Look Over Here: Attention-Directing Composition of Manga Elements Ying Cao, Rynson W.H. Lau, Antoni B. Chan ACM Transactions on Graphics, 2014 (SIGGRAPH 2014) [PDF] [Project]
	Automatic Stylistic Manga Layout Ying Cao, Antoni B. Chan, Rynson W.H. Lau ACM Transactions on Graphics, 2012 (SIGGRAPH Asia 2012) [PDF] [Project]

Honors

First Runner-Up, Postgraduate Student Research Paper Competition 2013-2014, IEEE (Hong Kong) CI Chapter
Research Tuition Scholarship (CityU)
Outstanding Academic Performance Award for Research Degree Students (CityU)
POSCO Asia Fellowship
Excellent Paper Award of Software College at Northeastern University
Merit Graduate Student of Northeastern University
Excellent Graduate of Northeastern University
Model of Excellent Student Leader of Northeastern University

Professional Service

Conference reviewer:
- SIGGRAPH/SIGGRAPH Asia
- Eurographics
- Pacific Graphics
- CVPR
- ICCV
- ECCV
- NeurIPS
- ICLR

Journal reviewer:
- ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG)
- IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG)
- IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI)
- IEEE Transactions on Multimeida (TMM)

Program committee:
- AAAI
- IJCAI
- ACM Multimedia
- MMM
- International Workshop on coMics ANalysis, Processing and Understanding (MANPU)
- International Workshop on Multimedia Artworks Analysis (MMArt)

Talks

2050@2021, Hangzhou, 2021 (Keynote Speaker)
AI for Content Creation Workshop, CVPR, 2020 (Keynote Speaker)
Google Research, USA, 2019
Dalian University of Technology, China, 2018
Multimedia Artworks Analysis Workshop, ICME, 2017 (Keynote Speaker)
Shenzhen University, China, 2016
SIGGRAPH, Canada, 2014
SIGGRAPH Asia, Singapore, 2012

Ying CAO