Photo of Jiajun Wu

I am an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and, by courtesy, of Psychology at Stanford University. Before joining Stanford, I was a Visiting Faculty Researcher at Google Research, working with Noah Snavely. I finished my PhD at MIT, advised by Bill Freeman and Josh Tenenbaum, and my undergraduate degrees at Tsinghua University, working with Zhuowen Tu.

Research

My group studies physical scene understanding---building machines that see, reason about, and interact with the physical world. Besides learning algorithms, what are the levels of abstraction needed by AI systems in their representations, and where do they come from? Our research aims to answer these fundamental questions, drawing inspiration from nature, i.e., the physical world itself, and from human cognition. Representative projects include Galileo, MarrNet, 4D Roses, the Neuro-Symbolic Concept Learner, and the Scene Language.

In addition to developing the representations themselves, we simultaneously explore their applications in various domains:

Here is some information for prospective students and visitors.

Thank you for your interest in joining my group! Due to the large number of emails I receive, I cannot respond to every email individually. Please review the information below before contacting me. Thanks.

Current Stanford students and prospective visiting students: please fill out this form. For Stanford MS students and undergraduates, the minimum time commitment is 15 hours per week for six months. For visiting graduate students, the minimum length of a visit is six months.

Prospective postdocs: please email me directly with your CV.

Prospective graduate students: please apply through the system and list me as a potential advisor in your application. There is no need to contact me, unless you have a particular research question/idea that you would like to discuss further.

Group

Postdocs
PhD Students
Affiliates
Alumni

Talks

Research Overview (Jan 2023)
Research Overview thumbnail
Scene Understanding via Intrinsics (July 2024)
Scene Understanding via Intrinsics thumbnail
Reasoning and Concept Learning (Nov 2024)
Reasoning and Concept Learning thumbnail

Publications (show selected / show all by date / show all by topic)

Year: 2026 / 2025 / 2024 / 2023 / 2022 / 2021 / 2020 / 2019 / 2018 / 2017 / 2016 / 2015 / 2014 and before
Current Research Topics: Physical Scene Understanding / Multi-Modal Perception / Visual Generation / Visual Reasoning / Robotics and Embodied AI; Past Research Topic: Weakly-Supervised Learning
(* and † indicate equal contribution or alphabetical order)
 
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ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award Honorable Mention
Joint AAAI/ACM SIGAI Doctoral Dissertation Award
MIT George M. Sprowls PhD Thesis Award in Artificial Intelligence and Decision-Making

2026

2025

2024

2023

Best Paper Award at the IROS Workshop on Learning Meets Model-Based Methods

2022

Sifan Ye*, Yixing Wang*, Jiaman Li, Dennis Park, C. Karen Liu, Huazhe Xu, Jiajun Wu†

2021

2020

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Daniel M. Bear, Chaofei Fan, Damian Mrowca, Yunzhu Li, Seth Alter, Aran Nayebi, Jeremy Schwartz, Li Fei-Fei, Jiajun Wu, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, Daniel L. K. Yamins
Oral Presentation

2019

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ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award Honorable Mention
Joint AAAI/ACM SIGAI Doctoral Dissertation Award
MIT George M. Sprowls PhD Thesis Award in Artificial Intelligence and Decision-Making

2018

2017

2016

2015

2014 and before

Physical Scene Understanding

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Daniel M. Bear, Chaofei Fan, Damian Mrowca, Yunzhu Li, Seth Alter, Aran Nayebi, Jeremy Schwartz, Li Fei-Fei, Jiajun Wu, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, Daniel L. K. Yamins
Oral Presentation
thumbnail_phd
ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award Honorable Mention
Joint AAAI/ACM SIGAI Doctoral Dissertation Award
MIT George M. Sprowls PhD Thesis Award in Artificial Intelligence and Decision-Making

Multi-Modal Perception

Visual Generation

Sifan Ye*, Yixing Wang*, Jiaman Li, Dennis Park, C. Karen Liu, Huazhe Xu, Jiajun Wu†

Visual Reasoning

Robotics and Embodied AI

Best Paper Award at the IROS Workshop on Learning Meets Model-Based Methods

Weakly-Supervised Learning