
HKU IDS Scholar Seminar Series #20:
Towards Multimodal and Interactive Visual Generation as World Models
Speaker
Prof Xihui LIU, Assistant Professor, HKU IDS & Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering
Date
Oct 13, 2025 (Mon)
Time
05:00pm – 06:00pm
Venue
Tam Wing Fan Innovation Wing Two | Zoom
Mode
Hybrid. Seats for on-site participants are limited. A confirmation email will be sent to participants who have successfully registered.
Abstract
As generative models achieve increasingly greater performance, the research frontier is shifting toward new challenges of multimodal and interactive world models. This talk presents recent advancements and insights across three interconnected themes. First, we introduce unified frameworks for multimodal understanding and generation, exploring methods to enhance their semantic-spatial reasoning abilities. Second, we demonstrate interactive video generation systems that incorporate action control mechanisms, enabling gaming-like experiences where users dynamically influence content evolution. Our solutions address critical challenges in memory and 3D consistency during prolonged interaction sessions. Finally, we propose autoregressive visual generation architectures that inherently support multimodal integration and interactivity. Through systematic architectural innovations, we overcome longstanding bottlenecks in output quality and computational efficiency, establishing a viable alternative to diffusion-based paradigms. Looking into the future, we aim to build multimodal and interactive visual generation models as world models.
Speaker

Prof Xihui LIU
Assistant Professor @ HKU IDS & EEE Professor Xihui Liu is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering (EEE) and the Musketeers Foundation Institute of Data Science (IDS), The University of Hong Kong. Before joining HKU, she was a Postdoctoral Researcher at UC Berkeley working with Prof. Trevor Darrell. She received her Ph.D. degree from Multimedia Lab, The Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2021 and her Bachelor’s degree from Tsinghua University in 2017. She has won several awards such as Adobe Research Fellowship 2020, MIT EECS Rising Stars 2021, CVPR 2021 Doctoral Consortium Award, WAIC Rising Star Award 2022, CVPR Outstanding Reviewers Award, and ICLR Outstanding Reviewers Award. For full biography of Prof. LIU, please refer to: https://datascience.hku.hk/people/xihui-liu/
Moderator

Dr Wenjie HUANG
Research Assistant Professor @ HKU IDS & DASE Dr. Wenjie Huang is Research Assistant Professor in Department of Data and Systems Engineering, The University of Hong Kong. He received Ph.D. degree from the Department of Industrial Systems Engineering and Management, National University of Singapore (NUS) in 2019 and B.S. degree in the Department of Industrial Engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China in 2014. Prior to joining HKU, he held joint postdoc positions at School of Data Science, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen and Group for Research in Decision Analysis (GERAD), Quebec, Canada. His research projects have been supported by NSFC research funds, NRF Singapore and NUS Young Investigator Award. For full biography of Dr. Huang, please refer to: https://datascience.hku.hk/people/wenjie-huang/
Moderator

Professor Yi Ma is a Chair Professor in the Musketeers Foundation Institute of Data Science (HKU IDS) and Department of Computer Science at the University of Hong Kong. He took up the Directorship of HKU IDS on January 12, 2023. He is also a Professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. He has published about 60 journal papers, 120 conference papers, and three textbooks in computer vision, generalized principal component analysis, and high-dimensional data analysis.
Professor Ma’s research interests cover computer vision, high-dimensional data analysis, and intelligent systems. For full biography of Professor Ma, please refer to: https://datascience.hku.hk/people/yi-ma/
For information, please contact:
Email: datascience@hku.hk
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