I am a research scientist at Meta Reality Labs. I received my Ph.D. degree from University of California Irvine in 2022, advised by Prof. Shuang Zhao. During my Ph.D. studies, I was awarded the 2021 Facebook Fellowship. Before that, I obtained my B.E. in Electrical Engineering from BJUT (2011-2015) and my M.S. in Computer Science from Columbia University (2015-2017).

My research focuses on physics-based rendering and its inverse problems (i.e., analysis by synthesis) centered around the inference of geometric and material properties from physical measurements (e.g., photographs, depth data). To develop a general solution to various inverse rendering problems, I have been working actively on the topic of physics-based differentiable rendering.

Find my CV here. (Updated on 11/11/2025)
Email: zhangchengee [at] gmail [dot] com

Neural-PBIR Reconstruction of Shape, Material, and Illumination

Cheng Sun, Guangyan Cai, Zhengqin Li, Kai Yan, Cheng Zhang, Carl Marshall, Jia-Bin Huang, Shuang Zhao, Zhao Dong
International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), October 2023
Paper | Project

SAM-RL: Sensing-Aware Model-Based Reinforcement Learning via Differentiable Physics-Based Simulation and Rendering

Jun Lv, Yunhai Feng, Cheng Zhang, Shuang Zhao, Lin Shao, Cewu Lu
Robotics: Science and Systems, July 2023
Best System Paper Award Finalist
Paper | Project

Efficient Path-Space Differentiable Volume Rendering With Respect To Shapes

Zihan Yu, Cheng Zhang, Olivier Maury, Christophe Hery, Zhao Dong, Shuang Zhao
Computer Graphics Forum (Eurographics Symposium on Rendering), 42(4), July 2023
Paper | Project

Efficient Differentiation of Pixel Reconstruction Filters for Path-Space Differentiable Rendering

Zihan Yu, Cheng Zhang, Derek Nowrouzezahrai, Zhao Dong, Shuang Zhao
ACM Transactions on Graphics (SIGGRAPH Asia 2022), 41(6), December 2022
Paper | Project

Path-Space Differentiable Rendering

PhD Dissertation
2023 ACM SIGGRAPH Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award
Dissertation

Antithetic Sampling for Monte Carlo Differentiable Rendering

Cheng Zhang, Zhao Dong, Michael Doggett, Shuang Zhao
ACM Transactions on Graphics (SIGGRAPH 2021), 40(4), August 2021
Paper | Project

Path-Space Differentiable Rendering of Participating Media

Cheng Zhang*, Zihan Yu*, Shuang Zhao (*equal contribution)
ACM Transactions on Graphics (SIGGRAPH 2021), 40(4), August 2021
Paper | Project

Path-Space Differentiable Rendering

Cheng Zhang, Bailey Miller, Kai Yan, Ioannis Gkioulekas, Shuang Zhao
ACM Transactions on Graphics (SIGGRAPH 2020), 39(4), July 2020
Paper | Project

Multi-Scale Appearance Modeling of Granular Materials with Continuously Varying Grain Properties

Cheng Zhang, Shuang Zhao
Eurographics Symposium on Rendering (EGSR), 2020
Paper | Paper (reduced resol.) | Project

A Differential Theory of Radiative Transfer

Cheng Zhang, Lifan Wu, Changxi Zheng, Ioannis Gkioulekas, Ravi Ramamoorthi, Shuang Zhao
ACM Transactions on Graphics (SIGGRAPH Asia 2019), 38(6)
Paper | Code | Project

FontCode: Embedding Information in Text Documents using Glyph Perturbation

Chang Xiao, Cheng Zhang, Changxi Zheng
ACM Transactions on Graphics (presented at SIGGRAPH 2018), 37(2)
Paper | Project | Video