"Research for curiosity, Engineering for impact."
Zhenhong Sun
PhD Candidate
Australian National University
Co-founder
Engineering-AI Lab
My research spans MLLM Understanding and Diffusion Models, 3D Representation and Agentic World Generation, and Adaptive Reasoning and Self-Improving Agents. I build controllable media systems, editable 3D worlds, and agents that improve through evidence and feedback.
At ANU and Engineering-AI Lab, I connect these directions in executable 3D environments where perception, generation, motion, and decision making can be studied together.
Research Projects
View all projectsMLLM Understanding and Diffusion Models
- Attention-guided image composition
- Multi-instance and diverse image synthesis
- Controllable talking avatars
3D Representation and Agentic World Generation
- Compact assets and part decomposition
- Editable 3D stories and active viewpoints
- Social 3D world motion
Adaptive Reasoning and Self-Improving Agents
- Diffusion LLM and evidence-guided reasoning
- Context- and language-conditioned decisions
- Reasoning and decisions across tasks
News
- Sep2026 Look-Before-Move (corresponding author) and DRIFT accepted by NeurIPS 2026.
- Jun2026 StoryBlender accepted by ECCV 2026 (equal first author).
- May2026 Invited to serve as an Area Chair for NeurIPS 2026.
- Apr2026 MA-RAG accepted by ICML 2026.
- Feb2026 S-ICQL accepted by ICLR 2026.
- Feb2026 First-author T³-S2S paper accepted by TMLR 2026.
- Oct2025 Started an academic exchange to NTU with Prof. Daocheng Tao and NUS with Dr. Yatao Bian.
- Sep2025 Co-corresponding-author T2DA paper accepted by NeurIPS 2025.
- Feb2025 Started building Engineering-AI Lab on 3D World Model under the leadership of A.P. Huadong Mo.
- Oct2024 First-author EGGen paper accepted by ACM MM 2024.
- Jun2024 Human-Centric Priors paper accepted by CVPR 2024.
- Jan2024 Started Ph.D. study at the Australian National University, supervised by Prof. Daoyi Dong and Dr. Dong Gong, and Prof. Yuerui Lu.
- Feb2023 Equal-first-author E3D paper accepted by ICLR 2023.
- Jul2022 First-author MAE-DET and Entropy-Driven Quantization papers accepted by ICML 2022 and NeurIPS 2022.
- Aug2021 First-author IVR paper accepted by ACM MM 2021.
Representative Publications
View all publications-
Look-Before-Move: Narrative-Grounded World Visual Attention in Dynamic 3D Story Worlds Conference Corresponding LeaderNeurIPS 2026, arXiv:2606.26964.
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StoryBlender: Inter-Shot Consistent and Editable 3D Storyboard with Spatial-temporal Dynamics Conference Co-First LeaderECCV 2026, arXiv:2604.03315.
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T3-S2S: Training-free Triplet Tuning for Sketch to Scene Synthesis in Controllable Concept Art Generation Journal FirstTransactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR), 2026.
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Text-to-Decision Agent: Offline Meta-Reinforcement Learning from Natural Language Supervision Conference Co-CorrConference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2025), 2025.
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MAE-DET: Revisiting Maximum Entropy Principle in Zero-Shot NAS for Efficient Object Detection Conference FirstInternational Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2022), 20810-20826, 2022.