Mengqi (Mandy) Xia

夏梦琪

Member of Technical Staff at World Labs

About Me

Hi, this is Mandy!

I am a Member of Technical Staff at World Labs. I am interested in computer graphics and AI for better modeling and generating the 3D world.

I earned my PhD in Computer Science from Cornell University, advised by Prof. Steve Marschner. Before joining World Labs, I was a postdoctoral researcher at Yale University, working with Prof. Julie Dorsey and Prof. Holly Rushmeier, and at EPFL, working with Prof. Wenzel Jakob. Before pursuing graduate studies, I received my Bachelor of Science in Applied Mathematics from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where I worked with Prof. Chenfanfu Jiang and Prof. Joseph Teran.

Outside of work, I enjoy rock climbing and playing the drums.

News

  • Jun 2026: Joined World Labs as a Member of Technical Staff.
  • Jan 2026: Serving on the program committee for EGSR 2026.
  • Dec 2025: Serving on the program committee for SIGGRAPH Asia 2026.
  • Sep 2025: Serving on the paper committees for SIGGRAPH 2026 and Eurographics 2026.
  • Sep 2025: Invited talk at Adobe Research.
  • Aug 2025: “Spectral Reconstruction with Uncertainty Quantification via Differentiable Rendering and Null-Space Sampling” accepted to SIGGRAPH Asia 2025.
  • Jun 2025: Invited talks at Peking University, Tsinghua University, and Beijing Normal University.
  • May 2025: Congrats to Rachel Liang on successfully defending her master’s thesis!
  • Apr 2025: Invited talk at the New England Symposium on Graphics, MIT.
  • Mar 2025: “Predicting Fabric Appearance Through Thread Scattering and Inversion” accepted to SIGGRAPH 2025.
  • Jan 2025: Guest instructor for CPCS 479/579 – Advanced Topics in Computer Graphics (Spring 2025).
  • Nov 2024: Serving on program committees for SIGGRAPH 2025 and EGSR 2025.

Publications

image
Spectral Reconstruction with Uncertainty Quantification via Differentiable Rendering and Null-Space Sampling
Mengqi (Mandy) Xia, Bai Xue, Rachel Liang, Holly Rushmeier
ACM SIGGRAPH Asia 2025
image
Predicting Fabric Appearance Through Thread Scattering and Inversion
Mengqi (Mandy) Xia, Zhaoyang Zhang, Sumit Chaturvedi, Yutong Yi, Rundong Wu, Holly Rushmeier, Julie Dorsey
ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 2025)
image
Retrieving Fine-Scale Leaf and Soil Spectral Properties from Canopy Reflectance Using Differentiable 3D Radiative Transfer
Jianbo Qi, Jifan Wei, Mengqi (Mandy) Xia, Donghui Xie
Remote Sensing of Environment, vol. 333, p.115115, 2026
image
A Practical Wave Optics Reflection Model for Hair and Fur
Mengqi (Mandy) Xia, Bruce Walter, Christophe Hery, Olivier Maury, Eric Michielssen, Steve Marschner
ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 2023)
image
A Full-Wave Reference Simulator for Computing Surface Reflectance
Yunchen Yu, Mengqi (Mandy) Xia, Bruce Walter, Eric Michielssen, Steve Marschner
ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 2023)
image
Iridescent Water Droplets Beyond Mie Scattering
Mengqi (Mandy) Xia, Bruce Walter, Steve Marschner
Computer Graphics Forum (Proceedings of Eurographics Symposium on Rendering 2023)
image
A Hyperspectral Space of Skin Tones for Inverse Rendering of Biophysical Skin Properties
Carlos Aliaga, Mengqi (Mandy) Xia, Hao Xie, Adrian Jarabo, Gustav Braun, Christophe Hery
Computer Graphics Forum (Proceedings of Eurographics Symposium on Rendering 2023)
image
Gaussian Product Sampling for Rendering Layered Materials
Mengqi (Mandy) Xia, Bruce Walter, Christophe Hery, Steve Marschner
Computer Graphics Forum 39:1 (February 2020), presented at Eurographics 2021
image
An Efficient Primal-Dual Method for the Obstacle Problem
Dominique Zosso, Braxton Osting, Mengqi (Mandy) Xia, Stanley J. Osher
Journal of Scientific Computing, 2017

Industry Research Experience

Facebook Reality Labs

Summer 2020, 2021
Research intern

Pixar Animation Studios

Summer 2018
Research intern

Awards and Services

Selected for WiGRAPH Rising Stars

2022, 2023
A two-year program of mentorship and workshops co-located with SIGGRAPH 2022 and 2023

Selected for EECS Rising Stars, UC Berkeley

November 9-10, 2020
An academic career workshop for women in EECS

SIGGRAPH 2025, 2026, SIGGRAPH Asia 2026, Eurographics 2026, EGSR 2025, 2026, Eurographics 2025 Short Paper, CAD/Graphics 2025

Committee member

SIGGRAPH, SIGGRAPH Asia, Eurographics, Eurographics Symposium on Rendering, Pacific Graphics, Transactions on Graphics, Computer Graphics Forum, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, Journal of Computer Graphics Techniques, Computers & Graphics, The Visual Computer, Journal of Quantitative Spectroscopy and Radiative Transfer, International Journal of Computer Vision

Reviewer