PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Anyi Rao

Also known as 饒安逸

Anyi Rao is a researcher in creative AI whose work spans movie understanding, controllable images and generated video. He coauthored MovieNet in 2020, earned a PhD in information engineering at CUHK in 2022, and was a Stanford postdoctoral scholar in 2023. ControlNet won ICCV's 2023 Marr Prize; in 2024, he coauthored AnimateDiff and received the World Artificial Intelligence Conference Rising Star Award. At ICLR 2025, he coauthored IC-Light, was named to Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia, and his video-generation project received CCF-Tencent Rhino-Bird Fund support. He is an assistant professor in HKUST's Division of Arts and Machine Creativity and directs Multimedia Creativity Lab; Microsoft Research Asia named him a StarTrack Scholar in 2026.

Timeline

  1. 2020

    MovieNet for movie understanding

    His interest in storytelling takes root in childhood films starring Jackie Chan and Stephen Chow. In 2020, he coauthors MovieNet, a holistic dataset for movie understanding with 1,100 movies and multimodal annotations.

  2. 2022

    PhD in information engineering

    He earns a PhD in Information Engineering at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2022, doing his doctoral work in MMLab.

  3. September 2023

    Postdoctoral work at Stanford

    In September 2023, he is a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford with Maneesh Agrawala. His research experience also includes Meta Reality Lab, Vector Institute, University of Toronto, and Hong Kong University.

  4. 2023

    ControlNet and the Marr Prize

    With Lvmin Zhang and Maneesh Agrawala, he coauthors ControlNet, a neural network architecture that adds spatial conditioning to large pretrained text-to-image diffusion models. In 2023, the paper wins ICCV's Best Paper Award, the Marr Prize.

  5. 2024

    AnimateDiff and a WAIC award

    At ICLR 2024, he coauthors AnimateDiff, a framework with a plug-and-play motion module that animates personalized text-to-image models. He receives the Rising Star Award at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in 2024.

  6. 2025

    IC-Light and 2025 honors

    At ICLR 2025, he coauthors IC-Light, a diffusion-based method for illumination harmonization and editing. He is named to Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia in the Healthcare & Science category, and his video-generation project receives support from the CCF-Tencent Rhino-Bird Fund for film, television and animation.

  7. 2026

    A StarTrack Scholar

    He is named a Microsoft Research Asia StarTrack Scholar in 2026.

  8. As of October 2026

    HKUST professor and lab director

    He is an assistant professor in HKUST's Division of Arts and Machine Creativity. He directs the Multimedia Creativity Lab and serves as associate director of HKUST's Media Intelligence Research Center.

Career

  1. NowHong Kong University of Science and TechnologyAssistant Professor
  2. From 2023Stanford UniversityPostdoctoral Scholar

Education

  1. 2022Chinese University of Hong KongPhD

From the biography.

  1. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other universityIncludes Anyi Rao. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other university. We compare doctorate and 5+ year employment links, career timing and current workplaces for 187 major-prize and 1,111 best-paper winners.
  2. 20% of people at companies who shape AI also hold a university role, led by Google and Stanford UniversityIncludes Stanford University. We estimate that 539 of the 6,766 people with a known current organization (8%) hold both a university role and a company role, including 20% of people at companies and 13% of people at universities.
  3. More people shaping AI studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology than at any other institutionIncludes Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. We estimate where the people shaping AI studied and where their careers led. Massachusetts Institute of Technology leads with 467 former students, including 291 recorded doctorates.
  4. The company share of AI researchers’ top papers was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974Includes Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. We estimate where the people shaping AI worked when their most-cited papers appeared: the company share was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974, and Google led all organizations in 2020–2024.

Colleagues

People named in this biography, and people with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Anyi Rao yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. MovieNet: A Holistic Dataset for Movie Understanding arxiv.org. Checked 20 October 2026.
  2. Where AI Meets Humanity: A Scholar Democratizing Storytelling hkust.edu.hk. Checked 20 October 2026.
  3. Anyi RAO - The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Research Portal researchportal.hkust.edu.hk. Checked 20 October 2026.
  4. Anyi Rao – Brown Institute brown.stanford.edu. Checked 20 October 2026.
  5. Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models openaccess.thecvf.com. Checked 20 October 2026.
  6. Anyi Rao anyirao.com. Checked 20 October 2026.
  7. AnimateDiff: Animate Your Personalized Text-to-Image Diffusion Models without Specific Tuning proceedings.iclr.cc. Checked 20 October 2026.
  8. Scaling In-the-Wild Training for Diffusion-based Illumination Harmonization and Editing by Imposing Consistent Light Transport proceedings.iclr.cc. Checked 20 October 2026.
  9. Prof. Anyi RAO selected as Forbes 30 under 30 Asia 2025: Healthcare & Science amc.hkust.edu.hk. Checked 20 October 2026.
  10. Prof. Anyi RAO receives 2025 CCF-Tencent Rhino-Bird Fund amc.hkust.edu.hk. Checked 20 October 2026.