Yiran Zhang

I am currently a third-year Ph.D. in Computer Science at Purdue University under the supervision of Dr. Aniket Bera. Before this, I was graduated at Northwestern University with a CS Master Degree and was fortunate to work with Dr. Emma Alexander, Dr. Diego Klabjan, and Dr. Ian Horswill. I also received my B.S. in Computer Science and B.A. in Visual Fine Art double degrees from Union College. My research passion lies in utilizing different learning techniques to create innovative solutions for computer graphics, VR/AR, and locomotion problems.

Email / CV / Scholar / Twitter / Github

Publications

	Observation-Consistent 3D Generation from Partial Visual Cues Yiran Zhang, Hrishikesh Viswanath, Sainan Liu, Aniket Bera, Proceeding to TMLR, 2027 Source Code and Dataset (Public Soon...) We build a generative model that creates complete 3D shapes from unordered 2D partial views, guided by captions and task labels.
	Fit First, Redirect Second: Building Physical Compatibility into Virtual Environment Design Yiran Zhang, Xingpeng Sun, Aniket Bera Proceeding to CHI, 2027 Source Code HCVR virtual scene generation framework optimized for VR navigation and compatible with alignment-based redirected walking controller to provide user a unique natural walking interface.
	TrustNavGPT: Modeling Uncertainty to Improve Trustworthiness of Audio-Guided LLM-Based Robot Navigation Xingpeng Sun, Yiran Zhang, Xindi Tang, Amrit Singh Bedi, Aniket Bera IROS, 2024 arXiv An LLM-based audio-guided navigation agent that uses affective cues in spoken communication—elements to assess the trustworthiness of human commands.

Working Papers

Evidence-Grounded Confidence for Occlusion-Robust Streaming 3D Reconstruction
Yiran Zhang, Hrishikesh Viswanath, Sainan Liu, Aniket Bera,
CVPR, 2027

Built a training-free confidence framework that fuses per-frame 3D generations from occluded video into one shape, marks which parts are observed and which are hallucinated across views, and aggregate evidences across to receive a final high-confidence result model. We leverage the utilization on object-oriented videos world models for robust 3D reconstruction.

Teaching and Mentoring

Teaching Assistant, COMP_SCI 180 Programming I, Purdue University, Fall 2023-Fall 2026

Teaching Assistant, COMP_SCI 182 Foundations of Computer Science, Purdue University, Spring 2025

Teaching Assistant, COMP_SCI 396 Advanced Computer Graphics Seminar: VR/AR Systems, Northwestern University, Summer 2023

Teaching Assistant, COMP_SCI 351-2 Advanced Computer Graphics, Northwestern University, Winter 2023

Teaching Assistant, COMP_SCI 327 Generative Methods, Northwestern University, Fall 2022

This website template is from Dr. Jon Barron. Thanks for his open-source spirit.