[Pingchuan :)]
Pingchuan Ma
Ph.D. Candidate, MIT CSAIL
Email: pcma (at) csail.mit.edu
Office: MIT Stata Center 32-321
Biography
Pingchuan Ma (馬平川) is a final-year Ph.D. candidate at MIT CSAIL advised by Prof. Wojciech Matusik. Previously, he worked with Prof. Bo Ren and Prof. Ming-Ming Cheng at Nankai University. His research goal covers the whole pipeline of physics-based intelligence: (1) reconstructing efficient realistic physics-based world models, (2) generating intelligent agents upon the world models, and (3) realizing the agents in the physical world. [...]
I am on job market now. Let's chat ;)
Name

Family name: () means horse.

Given name: (Píng)(chuān) means flat and level ground without geographical barrier.

Quoted from a Chinese idiom 一馬平川, my full name means the flat ground that one can ride straight across and thus implies enjoying a smooth life.

眾峰來自天目山,勢若駿平川

There are lots of mountains from Tianmu Mountain, which have the might of fine horses galloping across flat ground.

Research
(* indicates equal contribution, highlight indicates representative papers)
@article{guo2024physically,
  author={Guo, Minghao and Wang, Bohan and Ma, Pingchuan and Zhang, Tianyuan and Owens, Crystal Elaine and Gan, Chuang and Tenenbaum, Joshua B. and He, Kaiming and Matusik, Wojciech},
  title={Physically Compatible 3D Object Modeling from a Single Image},
  journal={Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems},
  volume={37},
  year={2024}
}
@article{li2024neural,
  title={Neural Fluidic System Design and Control with Differentiable Simulation},
  author={Li, Yifei and Sun, Yuchen and Ma, Pingchuan and Sifakis, Eftychios and Du, Tao and Zhu, Bo and Matusik, Wojciech},
  journal={Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems},
  volume={37},
  year={2024}
}
@article{liu2024kan,
  title={Kan 2.0: Kolmogorov-arnold networks meet science},
  author={Liu, Ziming and Ma, Pingchuan and Wang, Yixuan and Matusik, Wojciech and Tegmark, Max},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2408.10205},
  year={2024}
}
@inproceedings{ma2024llm,
  title={LLM and Simulation as Bilevel Optimizers: A New Paradigm to Advance Physical Scientific Discovery},
  author={Ma, Pingchuan and Wang, Tsun-Hsuan and Guo, Minghao and Sun, Zhiqing and Tenenbaum, Joshua B and Rus, Daniela and Gan, Chuang and Matusik, Wojciech},
  booktitle={International Conference on Machine Learning},
  year={2024},
  organization={PMLR}
}
@article{tian2023asap,
  title={ASAP: Automated Sequence Planning for Complex Robotic Assembly with Physical Feasibility},
  author={Tian, Yunsheng and Willis, Karl DD and Omari, Bassel Al and Luo, Jieliang and Ma, Pingchuan and Li, Yichen and Javid, Farhad and Gu, Edward and Jacob, Joshua and Sueda, Shinjiro and others},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2309.16909},
  year={2023}
}
@article{wang2024diffusebot,
  title={{DiffuseBot}: Breeding Soft Robots With Physics-Augmented Generative Diffusion Models},
  author={Wang, Tsun-Hsuan Johnson and Zheng, Juntian and Ma, Pingchuan and Du, Yilun and Kim, Byungchul and Spielberg, Andrew and Tenenbaum, Josh and Gan, Chuang and Rus, Daniela},
  journal={Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems},
  volume={36},
  year={2024}
}
@inproceedings{ma2023learning,
  title={Learning Neural Constitutive Laws from Motion Observations for Generalizable PDE Dynamics},
  author={Ma, Pingchuan and Chen, Peter Yichen and Deng, Bolei and Tenenbaum, Joshua B and Du, Tao and Gan, Chuang and Matusik, Wojciech},
  booktitle={International Conference on Machine Learning},
  pages={23279--23300},
  year={2023},
  organization={PMLR}
}
@inproceedings{wang2022softzoo,
  title={{SoftZoo}: A Soft Robot Co-design Benchmark for Locomotion in Diverse Environments},
  author={Wang, Tsun-Hsuan and Ma, Pingchuan and Spielberg, Andrew Everett and Xian, Zhou and Zhang, Hao and Tenenbaum, Joshua B and Rus, Daniela and Gan, Chuang},
  booktitle={The Eleventh International Conference on Learning Representations},
  year={2022}
}
@inproceedings{zhang2022sim2real,
  title={Sim2real for soft robotic fish via differentiable simulation},
  author={Zhang, John Z and Zhang, Yu and Ma, Pingchuan and Nava, Elvis and Du, Tao and Arm, Philip and Matusik, Wojciech and Katzschmann, Robert K},
  booktitle={2022 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)},
  pages={12598--12605},
  year={2022},
  organization={IEEE}
}
@inproceedings{nava2022fast,
  title={Fast Aquatic Swimmer Optimization with Differentiable Projective Dynamics and Neural Network Hydrodynamic Models},
  author={Nava, Elvis and Zhang, John Z and Michelis, Mike Yan and Du, Tao and Ma, Pingchuan and Grewe, Benjamin F and Matusik, Wojciech and Katzschmann, Robert Kevin},
  booktitle={International Conference on Machine Learning},
  pages={16413--16427},
  year={2022},
  organization={PMLR}
}
@inproceedings{ma2021risp,
  title={{RISP}: Rendering-Invariant State Predictor with Differentiable Simulation and Rendering for Cross-Domain Parameter Estimation},
  author={Ma, Pingchuan and Du, Tao and Tenenbaum, Joshua B and Matusik, Wojciech and Gan, Chuang},
  booktitle={International Conference on Learning Representations},
  year={2021}
}
@article{du2021diffpd,
  title={{DiffPD}: Differentiable Projective Dynamics},
  author={Du, Tao and Wu, Kui and Ma, Pingchuan and Wah, Sebastien and Spielberg, Andrew and Rus, Daniela and Matusik, Wojciech},
  journal={ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG)},
  volume={41},
  number={2},
  pages={1--21},
  year={2021},
  publisher={ACM New York, NY}
}
@article{ma2021diffaqua,
  title={{DiffAqua}: A Differentiable Computational Design Pipeline for Soft Underwater Swimmers with Shape Interpolation},
  author={Ma, Pingchuan and Du, Tao and Zhang, John Z and Wu, Kui and Spielberg, Andrew and Katzschmann, Robert K and Matusik, Wojciech},
  journal={ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG)},
  volume={40},
  number={4},
  pages={1--14},
  year={2021},
  publisher={ACM New York, NY, USA}
}
@inproceedings{ma2020efficient,
  title={Efficient Continuous Pareto Exploration in Multi-Task Learning},
  author={Ma, Pingchuan and Du, Tao and Matusik, Wojciech},
  booktitle={International Conference on Machine Learning},
  pages={6522--6531},
  year={2020},
  organization={PMLR}
}
@inproceedings{xu2020prediction,
  title={Prediction-guided multi-objective reinforcement learning for continuous robot control},
  author={Xu, Jie and Tian, Yunsheng and Ma, Pingchuan and Rus, Daniela and Sueda, Shinjiro and Matusik, Wojciech},
  booktitle={International conference on machine learning},
  pages={10607--10616},
  year={2020},
  organization={PMLR}
}
@article{ma2019learning,
  title={Learning Efficient Video Representation with Video Shuffle Networks},
  author={Ma, Pingchuan and Zhou, Yao and Lu, Yu and Zhang, Wei},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:1911.11319},
  year={2019}
}
@article{ma2018fluid,
  title={Fluid Directed Rigid Body Control using Deep Reinforcement Learning},
  author={Ma, Pingchuan and Tian, Yunsheng and Pan, Zherong and Ren, Bo and Manocha, Dinesh},
  journal={ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG)},
  volume={37},
  number={4},
  pages={1--11},
  year={2018},
  publisher={ACM New York, NY, USA}
}
Education
Ph.D. in Computer Science
Sep. 2019 - Present
S.M. in Computer Science
Sep. 2019 - Jan. 2023
Cambridge, MA
B.Eng. in Software Engineering
Sep. 2015 - Jun. 2019
Tianjin, China
Experience
Research Assistant | With Prof. Wojciech Matusik
Sep. 2019 - Present
Cambridge, MA
Research Assistant | With Prof. Dieter Fox
May 2024 - Present
Cambridge, MA
Teaching Assistant | 6.807/6.839 Advanced Computer Graphics
Sep. 2022 - Dec. 2022
Cambridge, MA
Research Summer Intern | With Prof. Chuang Gan
Jun. 2021 - Aug. 2021
Cambridge, MA
Research Intern | With Prof. Ping Luo and Dr. Wei Zhang
May 2018 - Feb. 2019
Shenzhen, China
Research Assistant | With Prof. Bo Ren and Prof. Ming-Ming Cheng
Apr. 2016 - Jun. 2019
Tianjin, China