Nikolaos Sarafianos

I am a research scientist at Meta Reality Labs working on 3D generative AI systems for building and editing virtual worlds and assets, shipped to Horizon Worlds creators at scale. My work spans 3D generative models, neural rendering, and 3D reconstruction, with a focus on bridging research and production systems. I received my Ph.D. from the University of Houston, where I worked on 3D human pose estimation, visual attribute modeling, and text-to-image retrieval. I am currently a mentor at Deep Learning Indaba.

Photo of Nikolaos Sarafianos

News

  • Mar. 2026: WorldGen is accepted to CVPR 2026
  • Jan. 2026: Co-organizing a workshop on 4D world models at CVPR 2026
  • Oct. 2025: Outstanding reviewer for ICCV 2025
  • June 2025: MaskedLRM is accepted to ICCV 2025
  • Mar. 2025: 3 Papers accepted to CVPR 2025 (one highlight)
  • Nov. 2024: Our work on 3D garment stylization has been accepted to 3DV 2025
  • July 2024: Our work on 3D Gaussian scene stylization has been accepted to ECCV 2024
  • Mar. 2024: 3 Papers accepted to CVPR 2024
  • July 2023: Our work on neural surface fields for human modeling has been accepted to ICCV 2023
  • Mar. 2023: Our work on viewpoint-independent video editing with 3D GANs has been accepted to CVPR 2023
  • Oct. 2022: Our work Pose-NDF, won the best paper honorable mention award at ECCV 2022

Work Experience

  • Meta Reality Labs logo Research Scientist (June 2019 - Present)
  • Oculus logo Research Scientist Intern (Summer 2018)
  • Amazon Alexa logo Research Scientist Intern (Summer 2017)

Industry Impact

Publications

WorldGen: From Text to Traversable and Interactive 3D Worlds
D. Wang, ..., N. Sarafianos, ..., R. Ranjan, A. Vedaldi
CVPR 2026
Paper   Meta Blog

3D Mesh Editing using Masked LRMs
W. Gao, D. Wang, Y. Fan, A. Božič, T. Stuyck, Z. Li, Z. Dong, R. Ranjan, N. Sarafianos
ICCV 2025
Paper   Webpage

UVGS: Reimagining Unstructured 3D Gaussian Splatting using UV Mapping
A. Rai, D. Wang, M. Jain, N. Sarafianos, A. Chen, S. Sridhar, A. Prakash
CVPR 2025
Paper   Webpage

Quaffure: Real-Time Quasi-Static Neural Hair Simulation
T. Stuyck, G. Lin, E. Larionov, H.-y. Chen, A. Božič, N. Sarafianos, D. Roble
CVPR 2025
Paper   Webpage   Video

PGC: Physics-Based Gaussian Cloth from a Single Pose
M. Guo, M. Chiang, I. Santesteban, N. Sarafianos, H. Chen, O. Halimi, A. Bozic, S. Saito, J. Wu, K. Liu, T. Stuyck, E. Larionov
CVPR 2025 (Highlight)
Paper   Webpage   Video

Garment3DGen: 3D Garment Stylization and Texture Generation
N. Sarafianos, T. Stuyck, X. Xiang, Y. Li, J. Popovic, R. Ranjan
3DV 2025
Paper   Webpage   Video   Code

Generating High-Fidelity Clothed Human Dynamics with Temporal Diffusion
S. Zou, Y. Xu, N. Sarafianos, F. Bogo, T. Tung, W. Si, L. Cheng
TOMM 2025
Paper

WaSt-3D: Wasserstein-2 Distance for Scene-to-Scene Stylization on 3D Gaussians
D. Kotovenko, O. Grebenkova, N. Sarafianos, A. Paliwal, P. Ma, O. Poursaeed, S. Mohan, Y. Fan, Y. Li, R. Ranjan, B. Ommer
ECCV 2024
Paper   Webpage   Code

Geometry Transfer for Stylizing Radiance Fields
H. Jung, S. Nam, N. Sarafianos, S. Yoo, A. Sorkine-Hornung, R. Ranjan
CVPR 2024
Paper   Webpage   Video

DiffAvatar: Simulation-Ready Garment Optimization with Differentiable Simulation
Y. Li, H.-y. Chen, E. Larionov, N. Sarafianos, W. Matusik, T. Stuyck
CVPR 2024
Paper   Webpage   Video

ANIM: Accurate Neural Implicit Model for Human Reconstruction from a single RGB-D image
M. Pesavento, Y. Xu, N. Sarafianos, R. Maier, Z. Wang, C.H. Yao, M. Volino, E. Boyer, A. Hilton, T. Tung
CVPR 2024
Paper   Webpage

HISR: Hybrid Implicit Surface Representation for Photorealistic 3D Human Reconstruction
A. Wang, Y. Xu, N. Sarafianos, R. Maier, E. Boyer, A. Yuille, T. Tung
AAAI 2024
Paper

NSF: Neural Surface Fields for Human Modeling from Monocular Depth
Y. Xue, B. Bhatnagar, R. Marin, N. Sarafianos, Y. Xu, G. Pons-Moll, T. Tung
ICCV 2023
Paper   Webpage   Code

VIVE3D: Viewpoint-Independent Video Editing using 3D-Aware GANs
A. Frühstück, N. Sarafianos, Y. Xu, P. Wonka, T. Tung
CVPR 2023
Paper   Webpage   Code

Pose-NDF: Modelling Human Pose Manifolds with Neural Distance Fields
G. Tiwari, D. Antic, J. Lenssen, N. Sarafianos, T. Tung, G. Pons-Moll
ECCV 2022 (Oral)
Best Paper Honorable Mention
[3 awards given out of 6773 submissions]
Paper   Webpage   Code

Free-Viewpoint RGB-D Human Performance Capture and Rendering
P. Nguyen, N. Sarafianos, C. Lassner, J. Heikkilä, T. Tung
ECCV 2022
Paper   Webpage

BodyMap: Learning Full-Body Dense Correspondence Map
A. Ianina, N. Sarafianos, Y. Xu, I. Rocco, T. Tung
CVPR 2022
Paper   Webpage   Video

SPAMs: Structured Implicit Parametric Models
P. Palafox, N. Sarafianos, T. Tung, A. Dai
CVPR 2022
Paper   Webpage   Video

Animatable Neural Radiance Fields from Monocular RGB-D
T. Wang, N. Sarafianos, M.H. Yang, T. Tung
arxiv 2022
Paper

Neural-GIF: Neural Generalized Implicit Functions for Animating People in Clothing
G. Tiwari, N. Sarafianos, T. Tung, G. Pons-Moll
ICCV 2021
Paper   Code   Webpage

Semi-supervised Synthesis of High-Resolution Editable Textures for 3D Humans
B. Chaudhuri, N. Sarafianos, L. Shapiro, T. Tung
CVPR 2021
Paper   Supplementary   Video   Poster   Webpage

Adversarial Representation Learning for Text-to-Image Matching
N. Sarafianos, X. Xu, I.A. Kakadiaris
ICCV 2019
Paper   Supplementary   Video   Poster

Deep Imbalanced Attribute Classification using Visual Attention Aggregation
N. Sarafianos, X. Xu, I.A. Kakadiaris
ECCV 2018
Paper   Supplementary   Code [Third Party]   Poster

Curriculum Learning of Visual Attribute Clusters for Multi-Task Classification
N. Sarafianos, T. Giannakopoulos, C. Nikou, I.A. Kakadiaris
Pattern Recognition 2018
Paper

Curriculum Learning for Multi-Task Classification of Visual Attributes
N. Sarafianos, T. Giannakopoulos, C. Nikou, I.A. Kakadiaris
ICCV Workshops 2017
Paper   Poster

Adaptive SVM+: Learning with Privileged Information for Domain Adaptation
N. Sarafianos, M. Vrigkas, I.A. Kakadiaris
ICCV Workshops 2017
Paper   Supplementary   Poster

3D Human Pose Estimation: A Review of the Literature and Analysis of Covariates
N. Sarafianos, B. Boteanu, B. Ionescu, I.A. Kakadiaris
CVIU 2016
Paper   Data