YKYou-Kang Kong

You-Kang Kong

*This is an algorithmically generated author record based on publicly available information.

Current Organizations / Institutes

The organizations/institutes from the scholar's latest article

Previous Organizations / Institutes

The organizations / institutes from the scholar's other articles in the past ten years


You-Kang Kong has a total of 17 co-authors. Here are the top co-authors by number of shared publications:


Latest Publications

  • Open Access

    CasLayout: Cascaded 3D Layout Diffusion for Indoor Scene Synthesis with Implicit Relation Modeling

    by Yingrui Wu, You-Kang Kong, Mingyang Zhao, Weize Quan, Dongmin Yan, Yang Liu

    Synthesizing realistic 3D indoor scenes remains challenging due to data scarcity and the difficulty of simultaneously enforcing global architectural constraints and local semantic consistency. Existing approaches often overlook structural boundaries or rely on fully connected relation graphs that introduce redundant generation errors. Inspired by human design cognition, we present CasLayout, a cascaded diffusion framework that decomposes the joint scene generation task into four conditional sub-stages with explicit physical and semantic roles: (1) predicting furniture quantity and categories, (2) refining object sizes and feature embeddings, (3) modeling spatial relationships in a latent space, and (4) generating Oriented Bounding Boxes (OBBs). This decoupled architecture reduces data requirements and enables flexible integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision Language Models (VLMs) for zero-shot tasks such as image-to-scene generation. To maintain physical validity within complex floor plans, we explicitly model building elements ( e.g. , walls, doors, and windows) as conditional constraints. Furthermore, to address the high entropy of dense relation graphs, we introduce a sparse relation graph formulation aligned with human spatial descriptions. By encoding these sparse graphs into a compact latent space using a bidirectional Variational Autoencoder (VAE), the proposed framework provides enhanced relational controllability, allowing generated layouts to better respect functional organization. Experiments demonstrate that CasLayout achieves state-of-the-art performance in fidelity and diversity while enabling improved controllability in practical applications.


  • Open Access

    SQuadGen: Generating Simple Quad Layouts via Chart Distance Fields

    by You-Kang Kong, Yang Liu, Yue Dong, Xin Tong, Heung-Yeung Shum

    3D shapes from scanning, reconstruction, or AI-generated content often lack simple quad mesh layouts—critical for efficient editing and modeling. Existing quad-remeshing techniques typically produce complex layouts with irregular loops, leading to tedious manual cleanup and extensive algorithm tuning. We introduce SQUADGEN, a diffusion-based generative framework that leverages Chart Distance Fields (CDF) to synthesize simple quad layouts on 3D shapes. Our approach addresses two key challenges: (1) the discrete nature of mesh connectivity, which hinders learning, and (2) the scarcity of large-scale datasets with simple quad meshes. To overcome the first, we propose CDF, a continuous surface-based representation enabling effective learning and synthesis of quad layouts. To address the second, we define loop-aware simplicity metrics and construct a large-scale dataset of high-quality quad layouts recovered from public 3D repositories through a robust quad-recovery pipeline. Extensive evaluations across diverse 3D inputs show that SQUADGEN consistently outperforms existing methods, producing robust, artist-friendly simple quad layouts.

  • Open Access

    DiLightNet: Fine-grained Lighting Control for Diffusion-based Image Generation

    by Chong Zeng, Yue Dong, Pieter Peers, Youkang Kong, Hongzhi Wu, Xin Tong

    This paper presents a novel method for exerting fine-grained lighting control during text-driven diffusion-based image generation. While existing diffusion models already have the ability to generate images under any lighting condition, without additional guidance these models tend to correlate image content and lighting. Moreover, text prompts lack the necessary expressional power to describe detailed lighting setups. To provide the content creator with fine-grained control over the lighting during image generation, we augment the text-prompt with detailed lighting information in the form of radiance hints, i.e., visualizations of the scene geometry with a homogeneous canonical material under the target lighting. However, the scene geometry needed to produce the radiance hints is unknown. Our key observation is that we only need to guide the diffusion process, hence exact radiance hints are not necessary; we only need to point the diffusion model in the right direction. Based on this observation, we introduce a three stage method for controlling the lighting during image generation. In the first stage, we leverage a standard pretrained diffusion model to generate a provisional image under uncontrolled lighting. Next, in the second stage, we resynthesize and refine the foreground object in the generated image by passing the target lighting to a refined diffusion model, named DiLightNet, using radiance hints computed on a coarse shape of the foreground object inferred from the provisional image. To retain the texture details, we multiply the radiance hints with a neural encoding of the provisional synthesized image before passing it to DiLightNet. Finally, in the third stage, we resynthesize the background to be consistent with the lighting on the foreground object. We demonstrate and validate our lighting controlled diffusion model on a variety of text prompts and lighting conditions.


  • Constrained Truth Discovery

    by Chen Ye, Hongzhi Wang, Kangjie Zheng, YouKang Kong, Rong Zhu, Jing Gao, Jianzhong Li

    To aggregate useful information among diversified sources, a hotspot research topic called truth discovery has emerged in recent years. Existing truth discovery methods attempt to infer the true attribute values for the entities by identifying and trusting reliable data sources. However, all these methods neglect the relations among different entities, which play important roles in truth discovery task. When reliable data sources cannot provide sufficient information of entities, the true attribute values of these entities can still be inferred by propagating trustworthy information from related entities. Motivated by this, in this paper, we introduce the constrained truth discovery problem. We incorporate denial constraints, a universally quantified first-order logic formalism, into the process of truth discovery. We formulate it as a constrained optimization problem and analyze its hardness. To address the problem, we propose algorithms to partition the entities into disjoint groups, and generate arithmetic constraints for each disjoint group separately. Then, the true attribute values of the entities in each disjoint group are derived by minimizing the objective function under the corresponding arithmetic constraints. Experimental results on both real-world and synthetic datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves good performance even with very few constraints and reliable sources.