Professor Komura, Taku

PhD Tokyo
Professor

Tel: (+852) 2859 7072
Fax: (+852) 2559 8447
Email: taku@cs.hku.hk
Homepage: https://www.cs.hku.hk/~taku

Taku Komura joined Hong Kong University in 2020. Before joining HKU, he worked at the University of Edinburgh (2006-2020), City University of Hong Kong (2002-2006) and RIKEN (2000-2002). He received his BSc, MSc and PhD in Information Science from University of Tokyo. His research has focused on data-driven character animation, physically-based character animation, crowd simulation, 3D modelling, cloth animation, anatomy-based modelling and robotics. Recently, his main research interests have been on physically-based animation and the application of machine learning techniques for animation synthesis. He received the Royal Society Industry Fellowship (2014), the Google AR/VR Research Award (2017), ACM SIGGRAPH Best Paper Award (2022) and ACM SIGGRAPH Test-of-Time Award (2026).   He served as Conference Chair for ACM SIGGRAPH Asia 2025.  

Research Interests

Physical simulation, Character animation, 3D modelling

Selected Publications

• Wang, Xuan, Zhaofeng Luo, Minchen Li, Taku Komura, and Kemeng Huang. "AGIPC: Adaptive In-Solve Algebraic Coarsening for GPU IPC." In Proceedings of the Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques Conference Conference Papers, pp. 1-11. 2026
• Pi, Huaijin, Zhi Cen, Zhiyang Dou, and Taku Komura. "Coda: Coordinated diffusion noise optimization for whole-body manipulation of articulated objects." Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 38 (2026): 31758-31780.
• Pan, Liang, Zeshi Yang, Zhiyang Dou, Wenjia Wang, Buzhen Huang, Bo Dai, Taku Komura, and Jingbo Wang. "Tokenhsi: Unified synthesis of physical human-scene interactions through task tokenization." In Proceedings of the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference, pp. 5379-5391. 2025.
• Ye, Xiaohan, Xifeng Gao, Kui Wu, Zherong Pan, and Taku Komura. "SDRS: Shape-Differentiable Robot Simulator." IEEE Transactions on Robotics (2025).
• Huang, Kemeng, Xinyu Lu, Huancheng Lin, Taku Komura, and Minchen Li. "StiffGIPC: Advancing GPU IPC for stiff affine-deformable simulation." ACM Transactions on Graphics 44, no. 3 (2025): 1-20.
• Starke, Sebastian, Ian Mason, and Taku Komura. "Deepphase: Periodic autoencoders for learning motion phase manifolds." ACM Transactions on Graphics (ToG) 41, no. 4 (2022): 1-13.
• Fan, Yingruo, Zhaojiang Lin, Jun Saito, Wenping Wang, and Taku Komura. "Faceformer: Speech-driven 3d facial animation with transformers." In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, pp. 18770-18780. 2022.
• Wang, Peng, Lingjie Liu, Yuan Liu, Christian Theobalt, Taku Komura, and Wenping Wang. "Neus: Learning neural implicit surfaces by volume rendering for multi-view reconstruction." arXiv preprint arXiv:2106.10689 (2021).
• Sebastian Starke, He Zhang, Taku Komura, Jun Saito, "Neural State Machine for Character-Scene Interactions", ACM Transactions on Graphics 38(6), 2019 (Proceedings of SIGGRAPH Asia 2019)
• Ian Mason, Sebastian Starke, He Zhang, Hakan Bilen, Taku Komura, "Few-shot Learning of Homogeneous Human Locomotion Styles" , Computer Graphics Forum, 37(7), 2018
• He Zhang*, Sebastian Starke* (joint first authors), Taku Komura, Jun Saito, Mode-Adaptive Neural Networks for Quadruped Motion Control , ACM Transactions on Graphics 37(4),2018 (Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 2018)
• Daniel Holden, Taku Komura, Jun Saito "Phase-Functioned Neural Networks for Character Control", ACM Transactions on Graphics 36(4), 2017 (Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 2017)
• Xi Zhao, Ruizhen Hu, Paul Guerrero, Niloy J. Mitra, Taku Komura, "Relationship Templates for Creating Scene Variations", ACM Transactions on Graphics, 35 (6), 2016 (Proceedings of SIGGRAPH Asia 2016)
• Daniel Holden, Jun Saito, Taku Komura "A deep learning framework for character motion synthesis and editing", ACM Transactions on Graphics 35(4), 2016 (Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 2016)