Zian Li (李自安)

Zian Li (李自安)

Done is better than perfect.

🧑‍💻 Biography

I am now a third-year Ph.D. student of the Institute for Artificial Intelligence of Peking University, advised by Prof. Muhan Zhang.

My research focuses on generative models that span multiple modalities, including videos, images and molecules. Recently, I have been particularly interested in video generation and video world models. Before this, I have worked on geometric deep learning, particularly investigating the theoretical expressiveness of geometric models and developing powerful models within this domain. If you are interested in these areas, feel free to reach out!

🎖 Honors and Awards

  • 2025.10, Doctoral Dean’s Scholarship, Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Peking University
  • 2020.12, 2021.12, 2022.12, National Scholarship for Undergraduate Student
  • 2021.12, Outstanding Student Pioneer of Tianjin University (Nomination Award) (only 10 awardees and 5 nominated awardees university-wide per year)
  • 2021.08, First Prize of National Zhou Peiyuan Competition on Mechanics (~0.3%)
  • 2021.04, Meritorious Winner (First Prize) of ICM: Interdisciplinary Contest In Modeling

📖 Educations

  • PKU Logo 2023.09 -, Ph.D. student, Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Peking University
  • TJU Logo 2019.09 - 2023.07, B.E., School of Future Technology, Tianjin University

💻 Internships

📃 Publications

DUET: A Diversity-Quality Duet of Distillation Experts for Two-Step Video Generation
Zian Li, Litong Gong, Borui Liao, Pengfei Liu, Xinyu Wang, Xinyuan Wei, Yifan Gao, Tiezheng Ge, Muhan Zhang
Toward Better Geometric Representations for Molecule Generative Models
Shaoheng Yan*, Zian Li*, Cai Zhou, Qiaojing Huang, Kai Liu, Muhan Zhang
FlashMol: High-Quality Molecule Generation in as Few as Four Steps
Xinyuan Wei*, Zian Li*, Shaoheng Yan, Cai Zhou, Muhan Zhang
SubjectAnchor: Subject-Aware Memory-to-Video for Multi-Shot Storytelling ACMMM 2026
Xinyu Wang, Huafeng Shi, Zian Li, Yan Zhou, Xiaoqiang Liu, Yue Ma, Pengfei Wan
Rethinking Diffusion Models with Symmetries through Canonicalization with Applications to Molecular Graph Generation
Cai Zhou, Zijie Chen, Zian Li, Jike Wang, Kaiyi Jiang, Pan Li, Rose Yu, Muhan Zhang, Stephen Bates, Tommi Jaakkola
CanvasMAR: Improving Masked Autoregressive Video Generation With Canvas
Zian Li, Muhan Zhang
GeoRecon: Graph-Level Representation Learning for 3D Molecules via Reconstruction-Based Pretraining ICML 2026 GenBio Workshop
Shaoheng Yan, Zian Li, Muhan Zhang
Geometric Representation Condition Improves Equivariant Molecule Generation ICML 2025 Spotlight
Zian Li*, Cai Zhou*, Xiyuan Wang, Xingang Peng, Muhan Zhang
On the Completeness of Invariant Geometric Deep Learning Models ICLR 2025
Zian Li, Xiyuan Wang, Shijia Kang, Muhan Zhang
Is Distance Matrix Enough for Geometric Deep Learning? NeurIPS 2023
Zian Li, Xiyuan Wang, Yinan Huang, Muhan Zhang