Žiga Kovačič

I'm an incoming CS PhD student at Stanford, advised by Jiajun Wu. I'm interested in hierarchical world models that learn the right level of physical abstraction for each task and co-evolve through interaction. I also have a deep interest in physical simulation.

Previously, I completed my undergrad at Cornell, where I was fortunate to work with Kevin Ellis and was recognised as a Merrill Presidential Scholar.

Email GitHub Scholar CV X

Publications

See Google Scholar for the most up-to-date list.

MPMWorlds: MPM Simulations for Inferring and Extrapolating Physical Dynamics

Žiga Kovačič, Kevin Ellis

In submission (2026)

Project | Paper

Physics-Based Simulation

Minchen Li, Chenfanfu Jiang, Zhaofeng Luo, Žiga Kovačič, Wenxin Du, Chang Yu, Tianyi Xie

Online book, v1.0.3 (2026)

Book | Code

Refactoring Codebases through Library Design

Žiga Kovačič*, Justin T. Chiu*, Celine Lee, Wenting Zhao, Kevin Ellis

DL4C @ NeurIPS 2025, extension in submission

Project | Paper | Method | Benchmark

Pocket Time-Lapse

Eric M. Chen, Žiga Kovačič, Madhav Aggarwal, Abe Davis

SIGGRAPH 2025

Project | Code

Projects

MPM Yarn Simulation (2025)

Implements Anisotropic Elastoplasticity for Cloth, Knit and Hair Frictional Contact [C. Jiang et al., 2017].

Code

XPBD Simulator (2025)

PBD solver that simulates cloth, volumetric meshes, and fluids in the same solver. Code coming soon.

MLS-MPM and CPIC (2025)

Moving Least Squares Material Point Method, CPIC, various materials, and mesh extraction in 2D and 3D.

Code

Path Tracing in OCaml (2025)

Distributive ray tracing, reflections, refractions, volumetrics, emissive objects, and a BVH.

Code

Obstruction Removal — SliceSplatting (2024)

Modifies Gaussian Splatting to remove obstructions blocking objects of interest in 3D scene reconstruction. Code coming soon.

Pen-2-Graph (2024)

Generates node-edge graph programs from sketches using vision-language models and differential evolution.

Code

Image Space Modal Basis (2024)

Implements "Image-Space Modal Bases for Plausible Manipulation of Objects in Video", extended with modal warping.

Code

MelodyMesh (2023)

3D music visualizer that deforms meshes based on audio frequencies.

Code | Video

Teaching

CS 4787: Large Scale Machine Learning (Fall 2025) — Head TA. Distributed ML, large-scale optimization, scalable ML systems.
CS 4782: Introduction to Deep Learning (Spring 2025) — Head TA. Built an autograder from scratch for all assignments.
CS 4620: Introduction to Computer Graphics (Fall 2024) — TA.
CS 4780: Introduction to Machine Learning (Spring 2024) — TA. Received TA Award for outstanding teaching contributions.
CS 2110: Object Oriented Programming and Data Structures (Spring 2023) — TA.