Portrait of Ran Ding

Ran Ding

PhD Student

Physical AI, Computer Vision

About Me

I am a PhD student at Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI), advised by Prof. Ivan Laptev and Dr. Fabio Pizzati.

Previously, I earned an MSc in Computer Science from the Technical University of Munich and a BEng in Computer Science from Dalian University of Technology.

My current work focuses on physically plausible generative modeling and robot learning.

In my spare time, I enjoy cycling and traveling.

Research

(* and indicate co-first authorship and corresponding author, respectively.)

MessyKitchens video preview

MessyKitchens: Contact-rich object-level 3D scene reconstruction

Junaid Ahmed Ansari*, Ran Ding*, Fabio Pizzati, Ivan Laptev

European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2026

Dataset 3D Reconstruction Contact Reasoning

MessyKitchens provides high-quality synthetic training data and real-world test scenes for contact-rich kitchen reconstruction, with improved registration and reduced inter-object penetration. Built on it, MOD achieves state-of-the-art reconstruction and physical metrics.

TARGO and TARGO-Net teaser video

TARGO: Benchmarking Target-driven Object Grasping under Occlusions

Ran Ding*, Ziyuan Qin*, Yan Xia*, Guanqi Zhan, Kaichen Zhou, Long Yang, Hao Dong, Daniel Cremers

International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV), 2026

Benchmark Robot Grasping Occlusion

This work introduces TARGO, a benchmark dataset for target-driven grasping under occlusions in cluttered environments, along with TARGO-Net to improve grasping performance in these physically challenging settings.

Projects

Unsupervised Multi-View Stereo with Neural Radiance Field teaser

Unsupervised Multi-View Stereo with Neural Radiance Field

3D Computer Vision Project at TUM Visual Computing & Artificial Intelligence Lab2022

We extended Neural Radiance Field for multi-view stereo and trained it in an unsupervised manner to resolve view correspondence ambiguity.

Deformation Generation via Autoregressive Models teaser

Deformation Generation via Autoregressive Models

Research Internship at TUM Visual Computing & Artificial Intelligence Lab2023

Given partial deformation, we applied a decoder-only transformer to autoregressively generate diverse and complete deformation.

Chinese Undergraduate Curling AI Challenge teaser

Chinese Undergraduate Curling AI Challenge

Robotics Project at DUT Embedded Intelligent System Lab2020

We refined motion strategies for a curling robot and implemented a neural network regression model to predict the relationship between robot velocity and current position.

National Undergraduate Electronic Design Contest Liaoning Division teaser

National Undergraduate Electronic Design Contest Liaoning Division

Embedded System Design Project at DUT Embedded Intelligent System Lab2019

We developed a paper counting device using least squares fitting to correlate paper quantity and capacitance measurements from the FDC2214 sensor.

National Undergraduate Electronic Design Contest teaser

National Undergraduate Electronic Design Contest

Robotics Project at DUT Embedded Intelligent System Lab2020

We developed a target tracking system that controls a vehicle to follow a predefined path and parses data exchanged with a millimeter-wave radar.

Awards