Angel Xuan Chang
I am an Assistant Professor at Simon Fraser University. Prior to this, I was a visiting research scientist at Facebook AI Research and a research scientist at Eloquent Labs working on dialogue. I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford, where I was part of the Natural Language Processing Group and advised by Chris Manning. My research focuses on connecting language to 3D representations of shapes and scenes and grounding of language for embodied agents in indoor environments. I have worked on methods for synthesizing 3D scenes and shapes from natural language, and various datasets for 3D scene understanding. In general, I am interested in the semantics of shapes and scenes, the representation and acquisition of common sense knowledge, and reasoning using probabilistic models. Some of my other interests include drawing and dance.
News
- June 2022 - Workshops and Tutorials at CVPR 2022.
- June 19th - ScanNet Indoor Scene Understanding Challenge
- June 19th - Multi-Object Navigation Challenge at the Embodied-AI workshop
- June 20th - Tutorial: Building and Working in Environments for Embodied AI
- April 2022 - Congratulations to Ali Gholami and Yue Ruan for defending their MSc thesis!
- March 2022 - I'm excited to be part of BIOSCAN, a large, world-wide collaboration to identify and categorize the species of the world, and understand how they interact. I'm looking for a postdoc to use the latest advances in machine learning to develop algorithms to contribute to this project.
- February 2022 - We are hosting the Multi-Object Navigation challenge, as part of the embodied AI workshop at CVPR 2022.
- January 2022 - I'm happy to be hosting Dave Zhenyu Chen and Tommaso Campari as visiting students this term at SFU.

Assistant Professor
School of Computing Science
Simon Fraser University
GrUVi Lab | SFU NatLang | SFU AI/ML
Canada CIFAR AI Chair (Amii)
TUM-IAS Hans Fischer Fellow
Google Scholar
Recent Publications
Habitat-Matterport 3D Dataset (HM3D): 1000 Large-scale 3D Environments for Embodied AI
Santhosh K. Ramakrishnan, Aaron Gokaslan, Erik Wijmans, Oleksandr Maksymets, Alexander Clegg, John Turner, Eric Undersander, Wojciech Galuba, Andrew Westbury, Angel X. Chang, Manolis Savva, Yili Zhao, Dhruv BatraNeurIPS Datasets and Benchmarks Track 2021
pdf | webpage
Habitat 2.0: Training Home Assistants to Rearrange their Habitat
Andrew Szot, Alexander Clegg, Eric Undersander, Erik Wijmans, Yili Zhao, John Turner, Noah Maestre, Mustafa Mukadam, Devendra Chaplot, Oleksandr Maksymets, Aaron Gokaslan, Vladimír Vondrus, Sameer Dharur, Franziska Meier, Wojciech Galuba, Angel X. Chang, Zsolt Kira, Vladlen Koltun, Jitendra Malik, Manolis Savva, Dhruv BatraNeurIPS 2021
pdf | code | post
Language-Aligned Waypoint (LAW) Supervision for Vision-and-Language Navigation in Continuous Environments
Sonia Raychaudhuri, Shivansh Patel, Saim Wani, Unnat Jain, Angel X. ChangEMNLP 2021 (short)
pdf | code | webpage
Roominoes: Learning to Assemble 3D Rooms into Floor Plans
Kai Wang, Xianghao Xu, Leon Lei, Selena Ling, Natalie Lindsay, Angel X. Chang, Manolis Savva, Daniel RitchieSGP 2021
pdf | video
Research Themes
Grounding language to 3D
Scan2Cap: Context-aware Dense Captioning in RGB-D Scans
Dave Zhenyu Chen, Ali Gholami, Matthias Nießner, Angel X. ChangCVPR 2021
pdf | code | webpage
ScanRefer: 3D Object Localization in RGB-D Scans using Natural Language
Dave Zhenyu Chen, Angel X. Chang, Matthias NießnerECCV 2020
pdf | code | benchmark | webpage
Language based content creation
Text2Shape: Generating Shapes from Natural Language by Learning Joint Embeddings
Kevin Chen, Christopher B. Choy, Manolis Savva, Angel X. Chang, Thomas Funkhouser, Silvio SavareseProceedings of ACCV 2018 (oral), arXiv:1803.08495 [cs.CV]
pdf | code | webpage
Text to 3D Scene Generation with Rich Lexical Grounding
Angel X. Chang, Will Monroe, Manolis Savva, Christopher Potts, Christopher D. ManningProceedings of ACL 2015
pdf | bib | webpage
Learning Spatial Knowledge for Text to 3D Scene Generation
Angel X. Chang, Manolis Savva, Christopher D. ManningProceedings of the 2014 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2014)
pdf | bib | webpage
Embodied AI
Language-Aligned Waypoint (LAW) Supervision for Vision-and-Language Navigation in Continuous Environments
Sonia Raychaudhuri, Shivansh Patel, Saim Wani, Unnat Jain, Angel X. ChangEMNLP 2021 (short)
pdf | code | webpage
Rearrangement: A Challenge for Embodied AI
Dhruv Batra, Angel X. Chang, Sonia Chernova, Andrew J. Davison, Jia Deng, Vladlen Koltun, Sergey Levine, Jitendra Malik, Igor Mordatch, Roozbeh Mottaghi, Manolis Savva, Hao SuarXiv preprint arXiv:2011.01975 [cs.AI], November 2020
Multi-ON: Benchmarking Semantic Map Memory using Multi-Object Navigation
Saim Wani, Shivansh Patel, Unnat Jain, Angel X. Chang, Manolis SavvaNeurIPS 2020
pdf | code | webpage
On evaluation of embodied navigation agents
Peter Anderson, Angel X. Chang, Devendra Chaplot, Alexey Dosovitskiy, Saurabh Gupta, Vladlen Koltun, Jana Kosecka, Jitendra Malik, Roozbeh Mottaghi, Manolis Savva, Amir R. ZamirarXiv preprint arXiv:1807.06757 [cs.AI], July 2018
Simulation platforms
Habitat 2.0: Training Home Assistants to Rearrange their Habitat
Andrew Szot, Alexander Clegg, Eric Undersander, Erik Wijmans, Yili Zhao, John Turner, Noah Maestre, Mustafa Mukadam, Devendra Chaplot, Oleksandr Maksymets, Aaron Gokaslan, Vladimír Vondrus, Sameer Dharur, Franziska Meier, Wojciech Galuba, Angel X. Chang, Zsolt Kira, Vladlen Koltun, Jitendra Malik, Manolis Savva, Dhruv BatraNeurIPS 2021
pdf | code | post
SAPIEN: a SimulAted Part-based Interactive ENvironment
Fanbo Xiang, Yuzhe Qin, Kaichun Mo, Yikuan Xia, Hao Zhu, Fangchen Liu, Minghua Liu, Hanxiao (Shawn) Jiang, Yifu Yuan, He Wang, Li Yi, Angel X. Chang, Leonidas Guibas, Hao SuCVPR 2020
pdf | webpage
MINOS: Multimodal Indoor Simulator for Navigation in Complex Environments
Manolis Savva, Angel X. Chang, Alexey Dosovitskiy, Thomas Funkhouser, Vladlen KoltunarXiv:1712.03931 [cs.LG]
pdf | code | video | webpage
Large-scale datasets for 3D deep learning
Habitat-Matterport 3D Dataset (HM3D): 1000 Large-scale 3D Environments for Embodied AI
Santhosh K. Ramakrishnan, Aaron Gokaslan, Erik Wijmans, Oleksandr Maksymets, Alexander Clegg, John Turner, Eric Undersander, Wojciech Galuba, Andrew Westbury, Angel X. Chang, Manolis Savva, Yili Zhao, Dhruv BatraNeurIPS Datasets and Benchmarks Track 2021
pdf | webpage
Mirror3D: Depth Refinement for Mirror Surfaces
Jiaqi Tan, Weijie (Lewis) Lin, Angel X. Chang, Manolis SavvaCVPR 2021
pdf | code | webpage
PartNet: A Large-scale Benchmark for Fine-grained and Hierarchical Part-level 3D Object Understanding
Kaichun Mo, Shilin Zhu, Angel X. Chang, Li Yi, Subarna Tripathi, Leonidas Guibas, Hao SuCVPR 2019, arXiv:1812.02713 [cs.CV]
pdf | video | webpage
Scan2CAD: Learning CAD Model Alignment in RGB-D Scans
Armen Avetisyan, Manuel Dahnert, Angela Dai, Manolis Savva, Angel X. Chang, Matthias NießnerCVPR 2019 (oral), arXiv:1811.11187 [cs.CV]
pdf | code | video | benchmark
Matterport3D: Learning from RGB-D Data in Indoor Environments
Angel X. Chang, Angela Dai, Thomas Funkhouser, Maciej Halber, Matthias Nießner, Manolis Savva, Shuran Song, Andy Zeng, Yinda ZhangProceedings of 3DV 2017, arXiv:1709.06158 [cs.CV]
pdf | code | webpage
ScanNet: Richly-annotated 3D Reconstructions of Indoor Scenes
Angela Dai, Angel X. Chang, Manolis Savva, Maciej Halber, Thomas Funkhouser, Matthias NießnerProceedings of CVPR 2017 (spotlight), arXiv:1702.04405 [cs.CV]
pdf | code | video | benchmark | webpage
ShapeNet: An Information-Rich 3D Model Repository
Angel X. Chang, Thomas Funkhouser, Leonidas Guibas, Pat Hanrahan, Qixing Huang, Zimo Li, Silvio Savarese, Manolis Savva, Shuran Song, Hao Su, Jianxiong Xiao, Li Yi, Fisher YuarXiv:1512.03012 [cs.GR], Dec 2015
pdf | bib | code | webpage
3D scene understanding and generation
Roominoes: Learning to Assemble 3D Rooms into Floor Plans
Kai Wang, Xianghao Xu, Leon Lei, Selena Ling, Natalie Lindsay, Angel X. Chang, Manolis Savva, Daniel RitchieSGP 2021
pdf | video
Plan2Scene: Converting Floorplans to 3D Scenes
Madhawa Vidanapathirana, Qirui Wu, Yasutaka Furukawa, Angel X. Chang, Manolis SavvaCVPR 2021
pdf | code | webpage
PlanIT: Planning and Instantiating Indoor Scenes with Relation Graph and Spatial Prior Networks
Kai Wang, Yu-An Lin, Ben Weissmann, Manolis Savva, Angel X. Chang, Daniel RitchieSIGGRAPH 2019
pdf | code
Hierarchy Denoising Recursive Autoencoders for 3D Scene Layout Prediction
Yifei Shi, Angel X. Chang, Zhelun Wu, Manolis Savva, Kai XuCVPR 2019, arXiv:1903.03757 [cs.CV]
pdf | code | webpage
Deep Convolutional Priors for Indoor Scene Synthesis
Kai Wang, Manolis Savva, Angel X. Chang, Daniel RitchieSIGGRAPH 2018
pdf | code
Semantic Scene Completion from a Single Depth Image
Shuran Song, Fisher Yu, Andy Zeng, Angel X. Chang, Manolis Savva, Thomas FunkhouserProceedings of CVPR 2017 (oral), arXiv:1611.08974 [cs.CV]
pdf | webpage