News

Updates from the group

A short record of recent papers, student recognitions, talks, and workshop activity from Prof. Cheng's group at the University of Washington.

2026

  1. Fengyi Wu receives UW GSFEI Top Scholar Award

    Fengyi Wu received the 2026 UW GSFEI Top Scholar Award. Fengyi works on multimodal reasoning and embodied AI, with current projects on language-guided perception and navigation.

  2. Two papers accepted to ACL 2026

    A survey on sign-language datasets was accepted to ACL Main, and GoVIG was accepted to ACL Findings. These papers connect the lab's interests in multimodal resources, language, and embodied navigation.

  3. ICLR 2026 oral paper

    Lossless Hierarchical Speculative Decoding was accepted as an ICLR 2026 oral paper. The method accelerates large-model generation while preserving the target output distribution.

2025

  1. NeurIPS 2025 oral paper

    Congratulations to former visiting student Yuxuan Zhou. Our paper MaxSup: Overcoming Representation Collapse in Label Smoothing was accepted for an oral presentation at NeurIPS 2025.

  2. Carwein-Andrews Ph.D. Fellowship

    Yifei Dong received the Carwein-Andrews Fellowship. Yifei works on world models, human-aware navigation, and embodied AI, including evaluation settings with dynamic human activity.

  3. CVPR 2025 Anti-UAV Workshop

    Prof. Cheng gave a keynote at the CVPR 2025 Anti-UAV Workshop. Securing the Skies received the workshop's Best Paper Award, reflecting the lab's interest in perception systems for safety-critical settings.

  4. AAAI and NAACL oral papers

    VDAct was presented as an AAAI 2025 main-conference Oral, and ProMQA was presented as a NAACL 2025 main-conference Oral. Both papers are part of the group's work on video-grounded understanding and evaluation.

  5. Yifei Dong receives UW GSFEI Top Scholar Award

    Yifei Dong received the 2025 UW GSFEI Top Scholar Award, a Graduate School award for incoming doctoral students. His early work in the group focuses on embodied AI, world modeling, and human-aware navigation.

  6. CVPR 2025 papers

    StableAnimator, on identity-preserving human image animation, and EDF, on dataset distillation, were accepted to CVPR 2025. Securing the Skies and Why We Feel appeared in CVPR workshops.

  7. ICLR 2025 acceptance

    MetaDesigner was accepted to ICLR 2025. The project studies controllable, user-centered multilingual WordArt synthesis, one example of the group's interest in human-facing generative tools.