PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Ye Yuan

Ye Yuan is a robotics researcher whose work spans human motion and AI systems for 3D avatars and humanoid control. He earned a B.E. from Zhejiang University in 2015, an M.S. from Carnegie Mellon in 2016, and a robotics Ph.D. there in 2022; NVIDIA named him a 2021 Graduate Fellow, and he joined NVIDIA Research as a Research Scientist in May 2022. His work includes PhysDiff's physics-guided human-motion diffusion, GAvatar and SimAvatar's text-driven 3D avatars, and SONIC's humanoid whole-body control. As of October 2026, he is a Staff Research Scientist and Tech Lead in NVIDIA Research's DAIR and LPR teams.

Now at
NVIDIA
Badges

Timeline

  1. 2015–2016

    Degrees at Zhejiang and CMU

    He earns a B.E. in computer science and technology from Zhejiang University in 2015 and an M.S. in computer science at CMU in 2016, where he works with Stelian Coros.

  2. 2021

    An NVIDIA Graduate Fellowship

    In 2021, NVIDIA names him a Graduate Fellow at Carnegie Mellon University.

  3. April 2022

    Robotics Ph.D. at CMU

    In April 2022, he defends his robotics Ph.D. thesis, Unified Simulation, Perception, and Generation of Human Behavior, at Carnegie Mellon under Kris Kitani.

  4. May 2022

    Joining NVIDIA Research

    He joins NVIDIA Research as a Research Scientist in May 2022.

  5. 2023

    PhysDiff motion diffusion

    He coauthors PhysDiff, a 2023 ICCV paper that uses physics-based motion projection to guide a diffusion model toward physically plausible human movement.

  6. 2024

    GAvatar text-to-avatar model

    In 2024, he is first author of GAvatar, which generates animatable 3D Gaussian avatars from text prompts and extracts detailed meshes using implicit learning.

  7. 2025

    Simulation-ready Gaussian avatars

    He coauthors SimAvatar, a 2025 CVPR framework for generating simulation-ready clothed human avatars from a text prompt.

  8. As of October 2026

    Staff scientist and tech lead

    In December 2025, NVIDIA's DAIR group releases SONIC, a generalist humanoid controller. In 2026, he co-first authors its Science Robotics paper, which scales motion tracking to produce natural, robust whole-body humanoid movements. As of October 2026, he is a Staff Research Scientist and Tech Lead in NVIDIA Research's DAIR and LPR teams.

Career

  1. Since 2022NVIDIAResearch Scientist

Education

  1. 2022Carnegie Mellon UniversityM.S.
  2. 2015Zhejiang UniversityB.E.

From the biography.

  1. 16% of AI career moves in the 2020s went from a university to a companyIncludes Ye Yuan. We estimate that 16% of AI career moves in the 2020s went from a university to a company; 29% of moves starting at a university went to a company, and 76% ended the university role.
  2. Google has the highest combined h-index among AI organizationsIncludes NVIDIA. We estimate that Google holds the highest combined h-index at 8,016, while universities account for 73% of the deduplicated total across AI organizations.
  3. 20% of people at companies who shape AI also hold a university role, led by Google and Stanford UniversityIncludes NVIDIA. 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.
  4. Google alumni have founded or led 133 other organizations, more than any other AI labIncludes NVIDIA. We estimate that alumni of 17 major AI labs went on to found or lead 350 other organizations, including 226 they founded, and we trace 472 career moves directly between 23 labs since 2010.

Colleagues

People with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

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

  1. Ye Yuan ye-yuan.com. Checked 21 October 2026.
  2. 2021 Graduate Fellows | NVIDIA Research research.nvidia.com. Checked 21 October 2026.
  3. ICCV 2023 Open Access Repository openaccess.thecvf.com. Checked 21 October 2026.
  4. CVPR 2024 Open Access Repository openaccess.thecvf.com. Checked 21 October 2026.
  5. CVPR 2025 Open Access Repository openaccess.thecvf.com. Checked 21 October 2026.
  6. DAIR @ NVIDIA Research research.nvidia.com. Checked 21 October 2026.
  7. SONIC: Supersizing Motion Tracking for Natural Humanoid Whole-Body Control nvlabs.github.io. Checked 21 October 2026.