~/ehsan pajouheshgar

// postdoctoral researcher · epfl

I am a Postdoctoral Researcher at EPFL IVRL and the Chair of Statistical Field Theory. My research sits at the intersection of Self-Organizing Systems, Computer Vision, Computer Graphics, and Artificial Life — exploring how simple local rules give rise to complex global behavior. I did my PhD at EPFL (supervised by Sabine Süsstrunk) and my undergraduate at Sharif University of Technology (Computer Engineering + Math minor).

what's new

May 20, 2026 Two papers accepted to SIGGRAPH 2026: From Cells to Pixels and Neural Particle Automata.
January 21, 2026 MemoryNCA accepted to Physical Review Letters.
August 1, 2025 Started a postdoc at EPFL.

selected publications

Neural Particle Automata: Learning Self-Organizing Particle Dynamics
Neural Particle Automata: Learning Self-Organizing Particle Dynamics
Ehsan Pajouheshgar*, Hyunsoo Kim*, Sabine Süsstrunk, Wenzel Jakob, Jinah Park
SIGGRAPH, 2026

We introduce Neural Particle Automata, a Lagrangian generalization of Neural Cellular Automata where each cell is a particle with a continuous position and internal state, using differentiable SPH operators and memory-efficient CUDA kernels to scale learned self-organizing particle dynamics.

Neural Cellular Automata: From Cells to Pixels
Neural Cellular Automata: From Cells to Pixels
Ehsan Pajouheshgar, Yitao Xu, Ali Abbasi, Alexander Mordvintsev, Wenzel Jakob, Sabine Süsstrunk
SIGGRAPH, 2026

We pair a coarse-grid Neural Cellular Automata model with a lightweight implicit decoder that maps cell states and local coordinates to appearance, enabling self-organizing NCA outputs to render at arbitrary resolution in real time while preserving regeneration, robustness, and spontaneous dynamics across 2D, 3D, and mesh domains.

Mesh Neural Cellular Automata
Mesh Neural Cellular Automata
Ehsan Pajouheshgar*, Yitao Xu*, Alexander Mordvintsev, Eyvind Niklasson, Tong Zhang, Sabine Süsstrunk
ACM TOG / SIGGRAPH, 2024

MeshNCA extends Neural Cellular Automata from regular grids to triangle meshes, enabling local self-organization and real-time dynamic texture synthesis directly on 3D surfaces without UV unwrapping or global communication.

NoiseNCA: Noisy Seed Improves Spatio-Temporal Continuity of Neural Cellular Automata
★ Best Student Paper Award
NoiseNCA: Noisy Seed Improves Spatio-Temporal Continuity of Neural Cellular Automata
Ehsan Pajouheshgar, Yitao Xu, Sabine Süsstrunk
ALife, 2024

We analyze NCA texture models in the continuous space-time limit, show that standard training overfits discretization near the seed, and use uniform-noise initialization to learn dynamics that stay consistent across resolutions, are robust to stochastic updates and additive noise, and behave like PDEs.

DyNCA: Real-time Dynamic Texture Synthesis Using Neural Cellular Automata
DyNCA: Real-time Dynamic Texture Synthesis Using Neural Cellular Automata
Ehsan Pajouheshgar*, Yitao Xu*, Tong Zhang, Sabine Süsstrunk
CVPR, 2023

DyNCA enables real-time and controllable dynamic texture synthesis, producing arbitrarily long and arbitrary-size video textures while improving synthesis speed and quality by orders of magnitude over prior optimization-based methods.

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awards & honors
2025
Distinguished Ph.D. Thesis Award
EPFL
Jul. 2024
Best Student Paper Award
ALife 2024 Conference
Dec. 2023
Teaching Assistance Excellence Award
EPFL
Aug. 2022
Best Paper Award
SIGGRAPH 2022 Conference
Oct. 2020
Doctoral Fellowship
EDIC, EPFL
Sep. 2019
Gold Medal
Iranian National Statistics Olympiad (Ranked 1st)
2016
30th place
IEEE Xtreme Programming Competition (among 2,000+ teams)
Aug. 2014
Gold Medal
Iranian National Physics Olympiad