Wentong Li 李文通 College of Artificial Intelligence Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics (NUAA) No.29 Jiangjun Road, Nanjing,China Office: 1205, No.1 Building

About Me

I am an Associate Professor of the College of Artificial Intelligence at Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics. In August 2025, I was a visiting researcher at Department of Computing, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, where I collaborated with my Ph.D. advisor, Prof. Lei Zhang (IEEE Fellow). Previously, I completed my Ph.D at College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University, supervised by Prof. Jianke Zhu and Prof. Lei Zhang , in June 2024. My recent research interests are Visual/Scene Understanding, Embodied AI and Vision-Language Models, particularly in:

• Fine-grained object-level spatial-temporal understanding: PixelRefer(ArXiv2025), VideoRefer(CVPR2025), Osprey(CVPR2024)
• Embodied understanding, reasoning, planning and action: Inst3D-LLM(CVPR2025), EOC-Bench(NeurIPS2025)
• Efficient and effective VLMs/MLLMs: TokenPacker(IJCV2025), VisionTrim(ICLR2026)
• Visual detection & segmentation: Point2RBox-v3 (ICLR2026), Box2Mask(T-PAMI2024), Point2Mask(ICCV2023), APro(NeurIPS2023), H2RBox(ICLR2023), Oriented RepPoints(CVPR2022)

Looking for self-motivated Masters, Research Interns/Assistants and Ph.Ds (co-supervised), please email me if you have interest.

News

• [2026.01]: Two papers are accepted by ICLR 2026.
• [2025.12]: We released a Survey forging Spatial Intelligence for Autonomous Systems.
• [2025.11]: One paper about Object-level Generation on Camouflage Images is accepted by AAAI 2026.
• [2025.11]: Our PixelRefer is reported by PaperWeekly and 机器之心, respectively.
• [2025.10]: We released PixelRefer, a new unified pixel-level MLLM framework for fine-grained regional understanding.
• [2025.10]: Shared a talk@PRCV2025.[Slides]
• [2025.9]: Two papers are accepted by NeurIPS 2025.
• [2025.8]: Be funded by NSFC 🎉.
• [2025.8]: Be invited to serve as Area Chair for ICLR 2026.
• [2025.8]: Visited The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, where I enjoyed the visit and shared a talk.[Slides]
• [2025.6]: We released the EOC-Bench, an object-centric embodied cognition benchmark in dynamic egocentric scenarios.
• [2025.5]: One paper is accepted by IJCV (TokenPacker, 57 citations at the time of acceptance).
• [2025.4]: Our VideoRefer and VideoRefer-Bench have been discussed and adopted by NVIDIA & UC Berkely in their DAM work.
• [2025.2]: Five papers are accepted by CVPR 2025 (One Highlight).
• [2025.2]: We released the VideoRefer-700K dataset on HuggingFace. Please see the VideoRefer Suite for the details.
• [2024.12]: Awarded Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award of ZJU (浙江大学优秀博士学位论文).
• [2024.6]: Obtained my Ph.D. degree from ZJU.

Publications

(*:equal contribution, #:corresponding author, +:project leader)

Preprints

Selected Publications

Research Experiences

• The Hong Kong Polytechnic University ｜Hong Kong SAR ｜ July.2025- Oct.2025
  Supervisor: Prof. Lei Zhang , Collaborator: Shihao Wang
  Visiting Scholar
• Ant Group | HangZhou | Dec.2022 - Sep.2024
  Collaborator: Jianshu Li,Dongqi Tang, Jian Liu
  Research Intern (Ph.D)
• Alibaba DAMO Academy | HangZhou | July.2020 - Oct.2020
  Supervisor: Prof. Lei Zhang
  Research Intern (Ph.D)
• Institution of Automation, CAS | Beijing | July.2018 - June.2019
  Supervisor: Prof. Peng Wang , Prof. Wanyi Li
  Research Assistant (Master)

Honors

• Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award of Zhejiang University, 2024
• Excellent Doctoral Graduates of Zhejiang Province, China (Top 1%), 2024
• Excellent Doctoral Graduates of Zhejiang University, 2024
• Tencent Scholarship, 2023
• Five-A Postgraduate Student, 2023
• Outstanding Postgraduate Student, 2020-2023
• Longhu Scholarship, 2022
• First-class Academic Scholarship, 2018-2023
• National Scholarship, 2016

Academic Services

• Area Chair:
  ICLR2026
  
• Conference Reviewer:
  AAAI2025, ICLR2025, CVPR2025, ICML2025, ICCV2025, NeurIPS2025, ACM MM2025
  CVPR2024, ICLR2024, ICML2024, ECCV2024, ACM MM2024, NeurIPS2024
  CVPR2023, ICCV2023, NeurIPS2023, ACM MM2023
  
• Journal Reviewer:
  Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI)
  International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV)
  Transactions on Image Processing (TIP)
  Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology (TCSVT)
  Transactions on Multimedia (TMM)
  Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing (TGRS)
  Pattern Recognition (PR)
  ACM Computing Surveys
  ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (P&RS)
  Neurcomputing
  

Tech. Talks

• Efficient Visual Understanding and Interaction with VLMs, PolyU HongKong, slides, 2025/08.
• Fine-grained Image Understanding with VLMs, ECNU, Visual Perception+X(VPX) Group, 2024/09.
• Osprey:Pixel Understanding with Visual Instruction Tuning, Video, slides, AI TIME, 2024/01.
• Point-supervised Image Segmentation, AntGroup, Machine Intelligence Group, 2023/09.

Teaching

• Intro. to AI: A Foundational Course, NUAA, Fall 2025.
• Foundations and Frontiers of Multimodal Large Models, NUAA, Spring 2025.
• Image Processing and Analysis, Police Brain of Zhejiang Province, Teaching Assistant, Fall 2022.
• FDS2021: Foundation of Data Structure, Zhejiang University, Teaching Assistant, Fall 2021.

© Wentong Li | Last update: Jan. 2026