Max W.F. Ku
I am a third-year PhD student in Computer Science at the University of Waterloo, Faculty of Mathematics, advised by Wenhu Chen and Yuntian Deng. Previously, I interned at Adobe Research and NVIDIA Research.
My research studies how generative models can understand and edit visual and executable worlds. I am particularly interested in moving beyond appearance-level generation toward interventions that preserve the structure, dynamics, and consequences of the underlying world.
My work has evolved from controllable image and video generation and evaluation, to physical reasoning and, more recently, world editing: editing existing worlds at increasingly deep levels, from visual properties and entities to dynamics and system-level behavior. I am especially interested in games as executable testbeds for world models and world editing, where interventions can be evaluated through actual state transitions and long-horizon interactions. My current research interests include
- World Editing: intervening on existing visual and executable worlds at increasing semantic and structural depth.
- Controllable Video and Image Editing: precise, counterfactual, and temporally consistent manipulation.
- World and Physical Reasoning: understanding dynamics, causality, and executable representations of visual environments.
- Evaluation and Interpretability: grounded and explainable evaluation of generative models.
Professional Activities
- Reviewer for Conferences & Journals: ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML, SIGGRAPH Asia, SIGGRAPH, TVCG, TIP, ACL, EMNLP, TMLR
- Reviewer for Workshops: ICMLW, ECCVW, WACVW, NeurIPSW
Community
- I lead GGG, a community-driven group dedicated to sharing and discussing papers on Generative AI.
- I host 1:1 Online Coffee Chat to share advice with students from underrepresented backgrounds.
Misc
- Vines’ Log, where I keep my reading notes and various logs.
- I was a member of the HK PolyU Robotics Team during ABU Robocon 2019-2021. A playlist.
- I used to compete in official gaming tournament UGC League Team Fortress 2 Highlander.
- “Wing Fung” (with the space) is my first name and “Ku” is my last name. “Max” is the commonly used “english name” that is not part of my legal name. This is common in Hong Kong.
- Project Moon Fans: We are not cavemen, we have technology.
- “The recipe for great work is: very exacting taste, plus the ability to gratify it.” - Paul Graham, Hackers and Painters
- 我只記風雪之中誰曾與我並肩守夜；亦記道途低谷誰願停步聽我一言。他日若我行至高處必不忘來時微光；凡曾護我於羽翼未豐之際我亦願護其一程。
news
| Sep 26, 2026 | My work at NVIDIA (PhyProbe) is Accepted to NeurIPS 2026. |
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| Jun 22, 2026 | Joined Adobe Research as an intern for Summer 2026. |
| Jan 25, 2026 | ImagenWorld and EditReward Accepted to ICLR 2026. |
| Jun 15, 2025 | Achieved a total of 1000 citations. |
| Jun 02, 2025 | Joined NVIDIA Deep Imagination Research as an intern for Summer 2025. |
