Yifei Li

李一飞 | CS PhD Student

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

I am a final-year PhD student at MIT CSAIL in the Computational Design and Fabrication Group, advised by Prof. Wojciech Matusik. I received my bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University, where I was fortunate enough to be advised by Prof. Jessica Hodgins.

My research builds intelligent physical systems that jointly optimize form and control, and learn from data through physics-based models. I was selected as a Rising Stars in EECS, Rising Stars in Computer Graphics, and received the MIT Stata Family Presidential Fellowship. I have spent summers interning at NVIDIA, Boston Dynamics AI Institute, Meta Reality Labs, Meta FAIR as a research intern, Google as a SWE intern and Activision Blizzard working on Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 game engine development.

Outside of research, I enjoy ballet, piano, photography and skiing. I grew up dancing ballet and am a member of the Harvard Ballet Company. I have two Maine Coon cats, 🐈 Balanchine & 🐈‍⬛ Yihui .

Interests

Differentiable Physics & Simulation
Computational Design of Physical Systems
Physical Intelligence

Education

Massachusetts Institute of Technology 2020 - Present

Ph.D. in EECS (Expected 2026), M.S. in EECS (2022)
Carnegie Mellon University 2016 - 2020

B.S. in Computer Science , minor in Machine Learning

Academic Service

Organizer

Posters Juror: SIGGRAPH 2026
Organizing: Vision Meets Physics, CVPR 2025
Web Chair: SCF 2025

Reviewer

Graphics

SIGGRAPH (Asia)
Transactions on Graphics
Eurographics
Computer Graphics Forum
Pacific Graphics

Vision

CVPR
ICCV
ECCV

AI

NeurIPS
ICLR
ICML
AAAI

News

[2025/9] Selected as Rising Stars in EECS.
[2024/9] NeuralFluid is accepted to NeurIPS 2024.
[2024/5] Selected as WiGRAPH Rising Stars in Computer Graphics. See you in Denver at SIGGRAPH !
[2024/2] DiffAvatar is accepted to CVPR 2024 .
[2023/3] Paper on Animated Drawings is accepted by TOG and will be presented at SIGGRAPH 2023.
[2022/8] AnisotropicStokes is accepted to SIGGRAPH Asia 2022 (Journal Track). Covered by MIT News and spotlighted on the MIT homepage.
[2022/3] DiffCloth is accepted by Transactions on Graphics. JoinABLe is accepted by CVPR 2022.

Publications

Neural Modular Physics for Elastic Simulation

Yifei Li, Haixu Wu, Zeyi Xu, Tuur Stuyck, Wojciech Matusik

In submission January 2026

Modular neural simulator architecture for elastic deformation with improved physical interpretability and generalization.

NeuralFluid: Nueral Fluidic System Design and Control with Differentiable Simulation

Yifei Li, Yuchen Sun, Pingchuan Ma, Eftychios Sifakis, Tao Du, Bo Zhu, Wojciech Matusik

Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2024 September 2024

Neural control and design of complex fluidic systems with dynamic solid boundaries using differentiable simulation.

DiffAvatar: Simulation-Ready Garment Optimization with Differentiable Simulation

Yifei Li, Hsiao-yu Chen, Egor Larionov, Nikolaos Sarafianos, Wojciech Matusik, Tuur Stuyck

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2024 December 2023

Physics-based digital avatar body and garment shape and material joint optimization using differentiable simulation

A Method for Automatically Animating Children’s Drawings of the Human Figure

Harrison Jesse Smith, Somya Jain, Yifei Li, Qingyuan Zheng, Jessica Hodgins

ACM Transactions on Graphics (presented at SIGGGRAPH 2023) February 2023

A framework for bringing children’s drawings of human figures to life. Try out our Public Demo (which was used by millions of users) to animate your own drawing, or explore our Dataset of ~180,000 animated drawings for your own research.

Fluidic Topology Optimization with an Anisotropic Mixture Model

Yifei Li, Tao Du, Sangeetha Grama Srinivasan, Kui Wu, Bo Zhu, Eftychios Sifakis, Wojciech Matusik

ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proceedings of SIGGRAPH Asia 2022) September 2022

A topology optimization method with an anisotropic and differentiable constitutive model to design Stokes-flow fluidic devices.

DiffCloth: Differentiable Cloth Simulation with Dry Frictional Contact

Yifei Li, Tao Du, Kui Wu, Jie Xu, Wojciech Matusik

ACM Transactions on Graphics (presented at SIGGGRAPH 2022) April 2022

A differentiable cloth simulator that uses a fast and novel method for deriving gradients in PD-based cloth simulation with dry frictional contact.

JoinABLe: Learning Bottom-up Assembly of Parametric CAD Joints

Karl D.D. Willis, Pradeep Kumar Jayaraman, Hang Chu, Yunsheng Tian, Yifei Li, Daniele Grandi, Aditya Sanghi, Linh Tran, Joseph G. Lambourne, Armando Solar-Lezama, Wojciech Matusik

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2022 March 2022

A learning-based method that assembles parts together to form joints.

Algorithmic Quilting Pattern Generation for Pieced-Quilts

Yifei Li, David E. Breen, Jim McCann, Jessica Hodgins

Graphics Interface 2019 May 2019

A computational framework to algorithmically design and fabricate quilts with decorative patterns.

Experience

Research Intern

NVIDIA

Managed by Umar Iqbal

May 2025 – Aug 2025 Santa Clara, CA

Research on avatar garment generation.

Research Intern

Boston Dynamics AI Institute

Managed by David Watkins

Jun 2024 – Aug 2024 Cambridge, MA

Ongoing research project on robot gripper finger design and optimization.

Research Scientist Intern

Meta Reality Labs

Managed by Tuur Stuyck

May 2023 – Sep 2023 Sausalito, CA

Research on physics-based digital avatar body and garment shape and material joint optimization using differentiable simulation, which resulted in a paper that is currently in submission.

Research Intern

NVIDIA

Managed by Miles Macklin , Jonathan Leaf

May 2022 – Aug 2022 (remote) Cambridge, MA

Research intern in the Simulation Technology group, where I worked on neural surrogate simulation model for cloth-body dynamics.

Research Intern

Facebook AI Research

Managed by Jessica Hodgins

May 2020 – Aug 2020 Pittsburgh, PA

Research on animating children’s humanoid sketches. The project resulted in a publication in ACM Transactions on Graphics, a public demo with millions of users, which in turn resulted in an annotated dataset of ~180,000 children drawings.

Software Engineering Intern

Google (GeoAR Team)

Managed by Carlos Correa

May 2019 – Aug 2019 Mountain View, CA

Designed, implemented and and created a demo for photorealistic rendering of geo-located outdoor and indoor AR objects. The concept of the demo is now revealed in Google Map immersive AR Navigation, where AR widgets are rendered realistically by estimating the lighting model of the environment.

Software Engineering Intern

Activision Blizzard

Managed by Michael Vance , Wade Brainerd

May 2018 – Aug 2018 Portland, ME

Implemented and optimized (~7ms/frame on PS4 ) a procedural grass system that runs on GPU for the core game engine of Call of Duty Black Ops 4, which was shipped with the game’s battle royale mode across all platforms in October 2018. You can see the procedural grass system in the BO4’s Battle Royale mode trailer.