Hi, I'm Animesh. I am a Senior Research Scientist at Qualcomm AI Research in Amsterdam. My research focus is on efficient and controllable video generative AI.

I did my Ph.D. at UCL, London.

Apart from this, I am passionate about cameras, and visual-storytelling. My Instagram account: @akanimax3

Shipped Products and Demos

MobileWan
Closing the quality gap for mobile video diffusion
Qualcomm 2026
Neodragon
On-device text-to-video on the Hexagon NPU
Qualcomm 2025
Meta 3D Gen
Text-to-3D asset generation in under a minute
Meta 2024

Publications

SQuad
Animesh Karnewar, Denis Korzhenkov, Amirhossein Habibian, Mohsen Ghafoorian
arXiv 2026

We distill the quadratic attention of a pretrained video diffusion model into a sub-quadratic alternative. Replacing all 30 blocks with SQuad-Attention recovers the original quality (82.99 VBench Tot.), but only when supervised fine-tuning and DMD2 are composed — either stage alone falls short.

UniCaMo
Long Vu, Tan Ngo, Animesh Karnewar, Amirhossein Habibian, Binh-Son Hua, Hung Bui, Minh Hoai Nguyen, Phong Nguyen-Ha
arXiv 2026

We construct 3D-grounded, motion-consistent initial noise for video diffusion, giving unified control over object motion, camera motion, and both jointly — including complex 3D trajectories — without retraining the base model.

PyramidalWan
Denis Korzhenkov, Adil Karjauv, Animesh Karnewar, Mohsen Ghafoorian, Amirhossein Habibian
CVPR 2026

We convert a pretrained video diffusion model into a pyramidal one, denoising at increasing spatial resolutions across timesteps, so that most of the sampling trajectory runs at low resolution and inference gets substantially cheaper.

GOEmbed
ECCV 2024

GOEmbed (Gradient Origin Embeddings) encodes source views into arbitrary 3D radiance-field representations while maximizing the transfer of source information.

HoloFusion
ICCV 2023

HoloFusion generates photo-realistic 3D radiance fields by extending HoloDiffusion with a jointly trained 2D super-resolution network.

HoloDiffusion
CVPR 2023

The first 3D-aware generative diffusion model that produces 3D-consistent images while being trained with only posed image supervision.

3inGAN
3DV 2022

An unconditional 3D generative model trained from 2D images of a single self-similar 3D scene.

ReLU Fields
SIGGRAPH 2022

A method to represent complex signals such as images or 3D scenes on regularly sampled grid vertices, matching the expressiveness of coordinate-based MLPs while retaining the speed of voxel grids — without neural networks or sparse data structures.

RGBD-Net
3DV 2021

A cascaded architecture for novel view synthesis combining a hierarchical depth regression network with a depth-aware generator, rendering spatially and temporally consistent target images.

MSG-GAN
Animesh Karnewar, Oliver Wang
CVPR 2020

A simple but effective technique addressing GAN instability by allowing gradients to flow from the discriminator to the generator at multiple scales — a stable alternative to progressive growing.

Experience & Education

Employment History

Senior Research Scientist 2025-Now
Qualcomm AI Research · Amsterdam, Netherlands
Visiting Researcher 2023-2024
Meta GenAI Research · London, UK
Research Scientist Intern 2022-2023
Meta AI Research · London, UK
R&D Engineer 2019-2021
TomTom · Amsterdam, Netherlands
AI Engineer 2017-2019
Mobiliya

Education

Bachelors in Computer Science 2013-2017
Pune Institute of Computer Technology
University topper, 4.0/4.0 GPA

Awards and Acknowledgements

Professional Service

CVPR Reviewer
ICCV / ECCV Reviewer
ICLR Reviewer
NeurIPS Reviewer
SIGGRAPH Reviewer
Pacific Graphics Reviewer

Teaching and Research Talks

MLVC course, UCL TA, 2021-2022
MIT, Pune Talk, 2019

Mentors

Oliver Wang
Google DeepMind, prev. Adobe Research
Niloy J. Mitra
PhD supervisor · UCL
David Novotny
SpAItial AI, prev. Meta GenAI London
Andrea Vedaldi
University of Oxford · Meta GenAI
Tobias Ritschel
PhD supervisor · UCL

Collaborators

Mohsen Ghafoorian
Denis Korzhenkov
Adil Karjauv
Fatih Porikli
Amirhossein Habibian
Phong Nguyen-Ha
Long Vu
Tan Ngo
Binh-Son Hua
Hung Bui
Minh Hoai Nguyen
Roman Shapovalov
Lam Huynh
Esa Rahtu
Jiri Matas
Janne Heikkila