Research Scientist @ Meta AI ยท London, UK
Video diffusion ยท generative neural rendering ยท talking avatars ยท world models
I'm a Research Scientist at Meta AI London, working on video diffusion models, generative neural rendering, talking avatars, and world models โ teaching machines to observe, imagine, and simulate visual reality. The longer-term hope is to make worlds as easy to build as they are to imagine, so anyone can freely express the ones in their head โ not only engineers.
I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Surrey (supervised by Prof. Tao Xiang and Prof. Yi-Zhe Song, working closely with Dr. Xiatian Zhu), and my Bachelor's in Computer Science (AI) from the University of Malaya.
๐ Currently building: Yume (ๅคข)
A programmable, explicit world model on Godot โ built by Claude, for Claude.
Yume is my take on a question I keep circling back to: what if you could describe a world in plain language and have it materialize into something runnable โ without writing any per-world code? (ๅคข means "dream" in Japanese.)
A world's entities and rules are written as pure JSON; a small fixed interpreter advances that world tick by tick; Godot projects the resulting state to pixels, audio, HUD, or text. The engine ships seven primitives โ Entity / Tag / Rule / Trigger / Effect / Query / Relation โ and no game-specific code. You describe a world; you never edit the engine.
A world model is just a transition function f(state, action) โ next_state. Yume lets you write f as JSON and run it โ which makes it useful well beyond games:
| Use | How |
|---|---|
| ๐ฎ Games | the Godot projection โ a playable build |
| ๐ค RL / agent-eval testbeds | deterministic, seedable, gym-like stepping |
| ๐๏ธ Scene / world generation | prose โ 3D scene pipelines |
| ๐ง Training data for neural world models | roll a JSON world out, record (state, action, next_state) trajectories, train a Dreamer/Genie-style implicit model that approximates the same f at scale |
That last row is the thesis: a clean, authorable explicit substrate that bridges to the implicit (neural) world-model world โ interpret it directly, and use it as a faucet of reproducible training data.
It's the most fun I've had with a side project in years โ the entire repo is written and operated by Claude Code. It's pre-1.0 and experimental, and I'd love for you to take a look. โญ
| Year | Work | Venue |
|---|---|---|
| 2026 | Kaleido โ unified neural rendering via spatial generative models | ICLR 2026 |
| 2026 | Rays as Pixels โ joint video generation & camera trajectory estimation | ICML 2026 |
| 2026 | VecGlypher โ LLM-based vector glyph generation from text/image | CVPR 2026 |
| 2024 | PartCraft โ part-based compositional image generation | ECCV 2024 |
| 2024 | ConceptHash โ interpretable hashing via part-based concepts | CVPRW 2024 (Best Paper) |
| 2021 | OrthoHash โ one-loss deep hashing with orthogonal centres | NeurIPS 2021 |
| 2019 | DeepIPR โ DNN ownership protection via passport layers | NeurIPS 2019 |
๐ Full list on my website and Google Scholar.
๐ซ kamwoh [at] gmail.com