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Kenny Chen

Welcome! I'm a 3rd year CS PhD student at New York University, advised by Prof. Qi Sun. I'm interested in studying how novel graphics, display, and AI systems can be optimized by understanding human perception.

This summer, I will be at Adobe Research. During my PhD, I spent a summer at the University of Cambridge (2025) working with Prof. Rafał Mantiuk, and interned twice at Meta Reality Labs (2023 & 2024), mentored by Dr. Alex Chapiro. Before my PhD, I did an MS at NYU (2023) and a BA at UC Berkeley (2021), both in computer science. I'm happy to chat about research or anything else; email me at [email protected]!

Email | Google Scholar | CV

Timeline [See All]
2026 01 A follow-up paper to our "What is HDR?" paper was accepted to HVEI 2026.
2025 12 A paper on ML-based display power optimization was accepted to Eurographics 2026.
12 We will hold an IEEE VR 2026 workshop on perception-driven VR/AR graphics/displays!
11 Two papers, GeneVA and Perceptual 3DGS, were accepted to WACV 2026.
09 Image-GS was featured on Two Minute Papers!
08 Our fast forward at SIGGRAPH for "What is HDR?" won an audience choice award!
08 I gave a talk at SIGGRAPH in Vancouver about our "What is HDR?" work.
07 I gave a talk about my work at the Rainbow Lab at University of Cambridge.
06 I started a research visit at University of Cambridge, working with Prof. Rafał Mantiuk.
Publications

(Representative papers are highlighted, *=equal contribution, †=equal advising)
ML-PEA: Machine Learning-Based Perceptual Algorithms for Display Power Optimization
Kenneth Chen, Nathan Matsuda, Thomas Wan, Ajit Ninan, Alexandre Chapiro, Qi Sun
Eurographics 2026
A neural net predicts spatially-varying dimming maps for display power optimization.
project page PDF code supplement

Perceptual Impact of Peak Luminance and Contrast in Direct View HDR Display
Kenneth Chen*, Yunxiang Zhang*, Qi Sun, Alexandre Chapiro
IS&T HVEI 2026
A follow-up to our 'What is HDR?' paper, adapted for direct-view displays.
project page PDF

Perceptually Guided 3DGS Streaming and Rendering for Virtual Reality
Yunxiang Zhang*, Sai Harsha Mupparaju*, Kenneth Chen, Jenna Kang, Xinyu Zhang, Maito Omori, Kazuyuki Arimatsu, Qi Sun
IEEE/CVF WACV 2026
3DGS for wide FOV displays using a perception-guided LOD framework.
project page PDF code

GeneVA: A Dataset of Human Annotations for Generative Text to Video Artifacts
Jenna Kang, Patsorn Sangkloy, Maria Beatriz Silva, Kenneth Chen, Niall L. Williams, Qi Sun
IEEE/CVF WACV 2026
A large-scale dataset of bounding boxes, ratings, descriptions of artifacts in AI videos.
project page PDF dataset (videos) dataset (labels)

What is HDR? Perceptual Impact of Luminance and Contrast in Immersive Displays
Kenneth Chen, Nathan Matsuda, Jon McElvain, Yang Zhao, Thomas Wan, Qi Sun†, Alexandre Chapiro†
ACM SIGGRAPH 2025
A perceptual scale to describe human preference for contrast and luminance when viewing HDR.
project page PDF doi code TLDR talk video supplement poster

Image-GS: Content-Adaptive Image Representation via 2D Gaussians
Yunxiang Zhang*, Bingxuan Li*, Alexandr Kuznetsov, Akshay Jindal, Stavros Diolatzis, Kenneth Chen, Anton Sochenov, Anton Kaplanyan, Qi Sun
ACM SIGGRAPH 2025
2D gaussians can serve as an effective technique for low bit rate image encoding.
project page PDF doi code video

Cost-Aware Routing for Efficient Text-To-Image Generation
Qinchan Li, Kenneth Chen, Changyue Su, Wittawat Jitkrittum, Qi Sun, Patsorn Sangkloy
arxiv 2025
Routing text prompts to different text-to-image models can save on compute time.
project page PDF

View Synthesis for 3D Computer-Generated Holograms Using Deep Neural Fields
Kenneth Chen, Anzhou Wen, Yunxiang Zhang, Praneeth Chakravarthula, Qi Sun
Optics Express 2025
Neural networks are trained to predict 3D holograms at novel scene views.
project page PDF doi video supplement

Process Only Where You Look: Hardware and Algorithm Co-optimization for Efficient Gaze-Tracked Image Rendering in Virtual Reality
Haiyu Wang, Wenxuan Liu, Kenneth Chen, Qi Sun, Sai Qian Zhang
ACM/IEEE ISCA 2025
Hardware-software co-optimization of VR eye tracking.
project page PDF doi

Perceptually-Guided Acoustic ``Foveation''
Xi Peng, Kenneth Chen, Iran Roman, Juan Pablo Bello, Qi Sun†, Praneeth Chakravarthula†
IEEE VR 2025
A sound source clustering technique based on a model of minimum audible angle.
project page PDF doi

PEA-PODs: Perceptual Evaluation of Algorithms for Power Optimization in XR Displays
Kenneth Chen, Thomas Wan, Nathan Matsuda, Ajit Ninan, Alexandre Chapiro†, Qi Sun†
ACM SIGGRAPH 2024 Best Paper Award (Honorable Mention)
A subjective evaluation of display power optimization algorithms for wide FOV displays.
project page PDF doi code video supplement poster award

Exploiting Human Color Discrimination for Memory- and Energy-Efficient Image Encoding in Virtual Reality
Nisarg Ujjainkar, Ethan Shahan, Kenneth Chen, Budmonde Duinkharjav, Qi Sun, Yuhao Zhu
ACM ASPLOS 2024
A DRAM traffic compression scheme using peripheral color modulation.
project page PDF doi code video

Toward Optimized VR/AR Ergonomics: Modeling and Predicting User Neck Muscle Contraction
Yunxiang Zhang, Kenneth Chen, Qi Sun
ACM SIGGRAPH 2023
A model to predict VR neck muscular workload trained on EMG data.
project page PDF doi code video

Color-Perception-Guided Display Power Reduction for Virtual Reality
Budmonde Duinkharjav*, Kenneth Chen*, Abhishek Tyagi, Jiayi He, Yuhao Zhu†, Qi Sun†
ACM SIGGRAPH Asia 2022
VR display power reduction via peripheral color modulation algorithm calibrated on color discrimination data.
project page PDF doi code video


Posters, Demos, etc.

BlendFusion: Procedural 3D Texturing Assistant with View-Consistent Generative Models
Qinchan Li, Finley Torrens, Kenneth Chen, Qi Sun
ACM I3D 2025 Best Poster Award
Diffusion models can be used for texturing 3D models.
project page PDF doi video poster

Towards Learning and Generating Audience Motion from Video
Kenneth Chen, Norman I. Badler
ACM SCA 2023 | Poster
A dataset of audience videos.
project page PDF doi video poster

Imperceptible Color Modulation for Power Saving in VR/AR
Kenneth Chen, Budmonde Duinkharjav, Nisarg Ujjainkar, Ethan Shahan, Abhishek Tyagi, Jiayi He, Yuhao Zhu, Qi Sun
ACM SIGGRAPH 2023 | Emerging Technologies Demo
A demo of the display setup and model from our SIGGRAPH Asia '22 paper.
project page PDF doi video


Community Involvement
Third International Workshop on Perception-driven Graphics and Displays for VR and AR (PerGraVAR) | IEEE VR 2026
webpage

Experience
University of Cambridge | Visiting Student, June 2025 - August 2025
Working on image quality metrics, mentored by Prof. Rafał Mantiuk.
Meta | Research Scientist Intern, June 2024- January 2025
Studied/modeled contrast and luminance preferences in HDR displays, mentored by Dr. Alexandre Chapiro.
Meta | Research Scientist Intern, June 2023 - January 2024
Studied the perceptual impact of display power optimization algorithms, mentored by Dr. Alexandre Chapiro.
Cesium | Research Scientist Intern, June 2022 - August 2022
Created an audience video dataset, supervised by Prof. Norman I. Badler.

Teaching
CS-GY 9223: Virtual and Augmented Reality, New York University
Course Assistant | Fall 2024 | Prof. Qi Sun
CS-GY 6313: Data Visualization, New York University
Course Assistant | Spring 2023, 2025 | Prof. Qi Sun
CS-GY 6533 A: Interactive Computer Graphics, New York University
Course Assistant | Fall 2021 | Prof. Claudio Silva
CS 184: Computer Graphics & Imaging, UC Berkeley
Undergraduate Student Instructor | Spring 2021 | Prof. Ren Ng & Prof. Angjoo Kanazawa | [slides]
CS 194-26: Intro to Computer Vision and Computational Photography, UC Berkeley
Group Tutor & Reader | Fall 2020 | Prof. Alexei Efros

Miscellanea