Pingchuan Ma (Chinese: 馬平川) is an AI Research Scientist at Meta's Superintelligence Labs. His research focuses on the intersection of machine learning, computer graphics, and robotics, with significant contributions in areas such as differentiable simulation, physics-augmented generative models, and multimodal learning. [1] [2]
Ma earned a Bachelor of Engineering degree in Software Engineering from Nankai University in Tianjin, China, attending from 2015 to 2019. Following his undergraduate studies, he moved to the United States to pursue graduate work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). At MIT, he joined the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), where he was advised by Professor Wojciech Matusik. He completed a Master of Science (S.M.) in Computer Science in February 2023 and successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis in Computer Science in February 2025. [1] [3] [6]
In July 2025, Ma joined Meta as an AI Research Scientist in its newly formed Superintelligence Labs, a team assembled to advance foundational AI research. His appointment was part of a significant talent acquisition effort by Meta, which recruited numerous researchers from other leading AI organizations.
Prior to his role at Meta, Ma was a Member of Technical Staff at OpenAI from February to July 2025, where his work centered on multimodal models and post-training techniques. Throughout his doctoral studies at MIT CSAIL from 2019 to 2025, he served as a Research Assistant. Ma's professional experience is supplemented by several research internships at prominent technology labs. He was an intern at the NVIDIA Seattle Robotics Lab from May to December 2024, working with Professor Dieter Fox. In 2021, he interned at the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab under the guidance of Professor Chuang Gan. His earliest industry internship was at SenseTime Research from May 2018 to February 2019. During his time at MIT, he also served as a teaching assistant for the 6.807/6.839 Advanced Computer Graphics course in the fall of 2022. His research career began with an assistantship at Nankai University, which lasted from April 2016 to June 2019.
Ma's research integrates concepts from machine learning, computer graphics, and robotics. A central theme in his work is the development and application of differentiable physics simulation, which enables the use of gradient-based optimization methods to solve complex physical inverse problems. This approach has been applied to challenges in soft robotics, fluid dynamics, computational design, and system identification. His work also explores the creation of physics-augmented generative models, which combine the expressive power of deep learning with the constraints of physical laws to produce more realistic and controllable outputs. Other key areas of his research include multimodal learning for vision and language, the development of efficient AI systems, and the application of AI to scientific discovery.
He has co-authored numerous papers presented at major AI and computer graphics conferences, including NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, SIGGRAPH, and ICRA.
A selection of his notable publications includes:
The above list represents a selection of Ma's contributions to the fields of AI, robotics, and computer graphics. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]