We welcome prospective Ph.D. students with strong research experience in multimodal and video reasoning, video generation, 3D reconstruction, physical AI, or agentic systems.
Updated October 31, 2026
How to get in touchWe are particularly interested in candidates with substantial experience in one or more of the directions below. You do not need expertise in every area. We value clear research questions, careful experimentation, strong implementation skills, and a willingness to collaborate.
Grounding language in visual evidence; learning and evaluating reasoning across images, video, text, and other modalities.
Relevant background: Experience training or adapting VLMs, designing multimodal evaluations, or studying grounded reasoning.
Understanding events, temporal relationships, and long-horizon context across clips, viewpoints, and videos.
Relevant background: Experience with video-language models, temporal grounding, long-video reasoning, or efficient video representations.
Controllable, temporally coherent generation and predictive representations that connect visual understanding with planning.
Relevant background: Experience with video diffusion models, generative modeling, motion representations, or learned dynamics.
Recovering human shape, motion, and dynamic scenes from visual observations, including Gaussian splatting and neural rendering.
Relevant background: Experience with human mesh recovery, multi-view geometry, 3D/4D reconstruction, or differentiable rendering.
Connecting multimodal perception and reasoning to robot planning, actions, and feedback from the environment.
Relevant background: Experience with robot learning, vision-language-action models, reinforcement learning, or simulation-based evaluation.
Improving the tools, memory, context management, orchestration, and feedback loops around AI models to make multi-step tasks more reliable and efficient.
Relevant background: Experience building and evaluating tool-using agents, execution environments, or systematic agent-improvement pipelines.
These are research preferences, not a substitute for UCF admission requirements. Applicants with a bachelor's or master's background should consult the UCF graduate application guidance and the requirements for their intended program. Any funding offer depends on available support and the formal selection process.
Read our research vision and publications to find the questions that interest you. Our Join Us page explains what to include in your inquiry and how to apply.