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Faculty
Lei Li
Assistant Professor of Data Science
School of Data Science
Email: eqc3xa@virginia.edu
Additional Contact Information
Website: craigleili.github.io/
Office: 102 Cresap, Rm. 102
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/craigleili
Lei Li is a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Data Science at the University of Virginia. His research interests are in computer vision and computer graphics, with a focus on advancing machine spatial intelligence to perceive, understand, and interact with the 3D world by developing innovative machine learning techniques combined with geometric principles.
Lei’s work has been published in top-tier venues, including CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, NeurIPS, and IEEE TVCG, covering topics including 3D scene reconstruction, human-scene interaction, shape analysis, geometric transfer learning, and generative models. He has served on technical program committees for major conferences including Eurographics and Pacific Graphics.
Before joining UVA in 2025, Lei worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Technical University of Munich in Germany and École Polytechnique / Inria in France. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and a B.Eng. in Software Engineering from Shandong University.
Education
- Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
- B.Eng. in Software Engineering, Shandong University
Data Science Domains
Analytics
Areas of Practice
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning; Computational Sciences; Human-Centered Design and Interaction; Sports Science and Analytics
Methodologies
Computer Vision; Geometric and Probabilistic Deep Learning; General Linear Models
Selected Publications
- Emery Pierson, Lei Li, Angela Dai, and Maks Ovsjanikov. DiffuMatch: Category-Agnostic Spectral Diffusion Priors for Robust Non-rigid Shape Matching. In IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2025.
- Haoxuan Li, Ziya Erkoc, Lei Li, Daniele Sirigatti, Vladyslav Rozov, Angela Dai, and Matthias Nießner. MeshPad: Interactive Sketch-Conditioned Artist-Reminiscent Mesh Generation and Editing. In IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2025.
- Daoyi Gao, Yawar Siddiqui, Lei Li, and Angela Dai. MeshArt: Generating Articulated Meshes with Structure-Guided Transformers. In IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2025.
- Quan Meng, Lei Li, Matthias Nießner, and Angela Dai. LT3SD: Latent Trees for 3D Scene Diffusion. In IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2025.
- Lei Li and Angela Dai. GenZI: Zero-Shot 3D Human-Scene Interaction Generation. In IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024.
- Souhail Hadgi, Lei Li, and Maks Ovsjanikov. To Supervise or Not to Supervise: Understanding and Addressing the Key Challenges of Point Cloud Transfer Learning. In European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2024.
- Souhaib Attaiki, Lei Li, and Maks Ovsjanikov. Generalizable Local Feature Pre-training for Deformable Shape Analysis. In IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2023.
- Lei Li, Nicolas Donati, and Maks Ovsjanikov. Learning Multi-resolution Functional Maps with Spectral Attention for Robust Shape Matching. In Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2022.
- Xuyang Bai, Zixin Luo, Lei Zhou, Hongkai Chen, Lei Li, Zeyu Hu, Hongbo Fu, and Chiew-Lan Tai. PointDSC: Robust Point Cloud Registration using Deep Spatial Consistency. In IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021.
- Lei Li, Siyu Zhu, Hongbo Fu, Ping Tan, and Chiew-Lan Tai. End-to-End Learning Local Multi-view Descriptors for 3D Point Clouds. In IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020.