Hi, I am Navami Kairanda, a fourth year Ph.D. student in the Visual Computing and AI department and 4DQV group at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics and Saarland University, Germany, where I am advised by Prof. Christian Theobalt and Dr. Vladislav Golyanik .

I build physics-informed AI methods that combine the elegance of physical laws and the power of machine learning for solving problems in visual computing and physics. I solve both forward and inverse problems such as simulation, and 3D reconstruction and tracking.

My current research interests include:

• Modelling and Simulation of Cloths
• 3D Reconstruction and Tracking of Deformable Objects
• Novel Representations of Physical Fields for solving Differentiable Equations
• Applications of Physics-Informed Machine Learning in Natural Sciences

If you have any questions or would like to collaborate, feel free to contact me!

• 20.07.2026: [New] Delighted to give an "Early Career Spotlight" talk at the Graphics x Science Workshop at SIGGRAPH 2026.
• 15.07.2026: [New] Attending London Geometry and Machine Learning Summer School.
• 15.05.2026: Happy to be recognised as "Gold Reviewer" at ICML 2026.
• 18.01.2026: Checkout our latest work on a new representation for efficiently solving differential equations: Project page. Source code here: Github link.
• 01.01.2026: Visiting Smart Geometry Processing Group at UCL for next three months. See you in London!
• 07.07.2025: I am attending Computer Vision Summer School and presenting some recent works. Checkout my poster here.
• 12.06.2025: Invited student lightning talk at the CVPR 2025 Workshop on Vision Meets Physics: Synergizing Physical Simulation and Computer Vision.
• 01.06.2025: Selected as finalist for the Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship 2025 Europe.
• 30.05.2025: Curious about our research or what it's like to work and collaborate at our institute? Hear from me and other MPI researchers in this short film.
• 12.09.2024: The source code of NeuralClothSim is now available here: GitHub link.

NeuralGarSim: Geometry-Agnostic Garment Simulation with Neural Fields Arihant Gaur, Navami Kairanda, Christian Theobalt, Vladislav Golyanik Accepted at European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) 2026, Malmö [paper (coming soon)] [source code (coming soon) ]

PINNsur: Physics-Informed Neural Networks for PDEs on Curved Surfaces Pranav Jain, Navami Kairanda, Peter Yichen Chen, Oded Stein ArXiv 2026 [paper] [source code]

∂∞-Grid: A Neural Differential Equation Solver with Differentiable Feature Grids Navami Kairanda, Shanthika Naik, Marc Habermann, Avinash Sharma, Christian Theobalt, Vladislav Golyanik International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2026, Rio de Janeiro [paper] [project page] [source code]

Thin-Shell-SfT: Fine-Grained Monocular Non-rigid 3D Surface Tracking with Neural Deformation Fields Navami Kairanda, Marc Habermann, Shanthika Naik, Christian Theobalt, Vladislav Golyanik Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2025, Nashville [paper] [project page] [video] [source code (coming soon)]

Ev4DGS: Novel-view Rendering of Non-Rigid Objects from Monocular Event Streams Takuya Nakabayashi, Navami Kairanda, Hideo Saito, Vladislav Golyanik British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC) 2025, Sheffield [paper] [project page] [video]

NeuralClothSim: Neural Deformation Fields Meet the Thin Shell Theory Navami Kairanda, Marc Habermann, Christian Theobalt, Vladislav Golyanik Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2024, Vancouver [paper] [project page] [video] [source code]

State of the Art in Dense Monocular Non-Rigid 3D Reconstruction Edith Tretschk*, Navami Kairanda*, Mallikarjun B R, Rishabh Dabral, Adam Kortylewski, Bernhard Egger, Marc Habermann, Pascal Fua, Christian Theobalt, Vladislav Golyanik (* equal contribution) Eurographics (STAR Report) 2023, Saarbrücken [paper] [project page] [talk]

φ-SfT: Shape-from-Template with a Physics-based Deformation Model Navami Kairanda, Edith Tretschk, Mohamed Elgharib, Christian Theobalt, Vladislav Golyanik Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2022, New Orleans [paper] [project page] [video] [source code] [dataset] Master Thesis, Saarland University [pdf]

Feature Engineering on Forest Cover Type Data with Ensemble of Decision Trees HR Pruthvi*, Nisha KK*, Chandana TL*, Navami Kairanda*, Biju R Mohan (* equal contribution) IEEE International Advance Computing Conference (IACC) 2015, Bangalore [paper] Bachelor Thesis, National Institute of Techonology Karnataka [pdf]

• September 2020 -- September 2021:
  Student assistant in Graphics, Vision & Video (group leader: Prof. Dr. Christian Theobalt) at the Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik, Germany
• August 2019 -- January 2020:
  Student assistant in Real Virtual Humans (group leader: Prof. Dr. Gerard Pons-Moll) at the Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik, Germany
• May 2014 -- July 2014:
  Research internship at Samsung Research & Development Institute India, Bangalore, India

• Jan 2026 -- present:
  Research Visitor at the Smart Geometry Processing Group in University College London, United Kingdom hosted by Prof. Niloy Mitra
  
• March 2022 -- present:
  PhD student in Computer Science at the Universität des Saarlandes, Saarbrücken, Germany and the Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik
  
• April 2019 -- February 2022:
  Masters in Visual Computing at the Universität des Saarlandes, Saarbrücken, Germany
  
• July 2011 -- May 2015:
  Bachelors in Informations Technology at the National Institute of Techonology Karnataka, Surathkal, India

• Reviewing (Conferences):
  CVPR 2024, 2025, 2026; ICLR 2026; ICML 2026 (Gold Reviewer); ICCV 2025; NeurIPS 2025
• Reviewing (Journal):
  Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics 2023; Computer Vision and Image Understanding 2023

• Seminars:
  SS2025: Advanced Topics of Computer Vision and Computer Graphics in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, Saarland University
  SS2024: Classical Concepts of Computer Vision and Computer Graphics in the Neural Age, Saarland University
  SS2023: Computer Vision and Machine Learning for Computer Graphics, Saarland University
  SS2022: Computer Vision and Machine Learning for Computer Graphics, Saarland University

• Shanthika Naik, Oct 2023 - Oct 2024 (MSc student intern, currently research fellow at IIT Jodhpur)
  
• Takuya Nakabayashi, Sept 2024 - Mar 2026 (PhD student intern, Keio University)
  
• Arihant Gaur, Apr 2025 - ongoing (Master thesis student, Saarland University)
  

• Solving PDEs with Differentiable Grids, Workshop on Graphics x Science at SIGGRAPH 2026
  
• Continuous Neural Representations for Physical Simulation, University College London (15 Jan 2026), Imperial College London (22 Jan 2026)
  
• Unfolding Cloth: Neural Deformation Fields for Simulation and Monocular Tracking, Workshop on Vision Meets Physics at CVPR 2025 [slides]
  
• State of the Art in Dense Monocular Non-Rigid 3D Reconstruction, State-of-the-Art Reports at Eurographics 2023 [video]
  
• Monocular 4D Reconstruction with a Physics Based Deformation Model, Higraphics 2023