Jiayuan Rao 饶珈源

🔎 About Me

I’m a 3rd-year PhD candidate at Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Shanghai AI Lab, researching on Multi-modal Learning and AI for Science (AI4Sports) supervised by Prof. Weidi Xie and Prof. Yanfeng Wang. I finished my undergraduate at UM-SJTU Joint Institute majoring in Electrical & Computer Engineering with Data Science minor degree. Currently, I’m visiting at KAUST and FIFA Research Institute with Prof. Bernard Ghanem and SoccerNet team. I’m also building an AI sports startup, hoping to let more people feel the passion and joy of sports through AI.

I was dreaming of becoming an athlete or a sports journalist, luckily AI gave me another chance to dive into sports media industry. I believe sports is all about human’s body and mentality, hope my work can truly benefits atheletics performance and sports media in the future. Feel free to contact me if interest.

🔥 News

[2026.05] SoccerMaster is selected as a CVPR 2026 Best Paper Candidate 🏆
[2026.05] An AI-powered sports viewing product MatchMate for the World Cup now in closed beta! Join here!
[2026.04] New preprint GenTac is released: generative modeling and forecasting of soccer tactics.
[2026.02] Started as visiting researcher @ KAUST and FIFA Research Institute.
[2026.02] 1 paper SoccerMaster is accepted by CVPR 2026 as an Oral presentation.
[2025.11] Hosted NICE Agent 2025 Event @ Shanghai.
[2025.11] Bronze medal 🥉🎾 in the University Tennis Championships of Shanghai.
[2025.10] Launch SN-VQA Challenge ⚽️🏆 @ CVPR2026, join for $1,000💰 prize!
[2025.10] Will attend ACM Multimedia 2025 @ Dublin as session chair.
[2025.9] Will give doctorial symposium and research demo in ISACE @ Shanghai.
[2025.8] 1 abstract accepted by CCSS, see you in November in Wuhan.
[2025.8] National Rank 5 🎾 in Chinese University Tennis Competition (Final Stage) Men’s Team.
[2025.7] Invited talk at SoccerNet from KAUST, cheers for soccer! 🍻
[2025.7] 1 paper SoccerAgent is accepted by ACM Multimedia 2025
[2025.6] Invited talk at EA 🎮, “EA Sports, it’s in the game!”
[2025.6] Will attend CVPR @Nashville and VALSE @Zhuhai both with poster presentation.
[2025.5] Silver medal 🥈⚽️ in Shanghai University Football League Cup.
[2025.4] Passed Doctoral Qualification Examination.
[2025.2] 1 paper UniSoccer is accepted by CVPR 2025.
[2024.12] Held “AI Movie & Long-form Video Understanding”.
[2024.12] Awarded the ‘50th Edition, 50 People’ Sports Talent of SJTU.
[2024.12] Will attend CSIG @ Zhejiang University with poster presentation.
[2024.11] Will attend EMNLP @ Miami with oral presentation.
[2024.9] Invited talk about AI4Sports and VLM at NICE, after that I will serve as a committee there.
[2024.9] 1 paper MatchTime has been accepted by EMNLP 2024 as oral presentation.
[2023.12] Bronze medal 🥉🎾 in the University Tennis Championships of Shanghai.
[2023.9] Started PhD career in SJTU and Shanghai AI Lab.
[2023.8] Graduate from JI and rewarded Shanghai Excellent Graduate 🎓.

📝 Research

GenTac: Generative Modeling and Forecasting of Soccer Tactics
Jiayuan Rao, Tianlin Gui, Haoning Wu, Yanfeng Wang, Weidi Xie
In submission (New)
[Paper] / [PDF] / [Webpage] / [Code]

SoccerMaster: A Vision Foundation Model for Soccer Understanding
Haolin Yang, Jiayuan Rao, Haoning Wu, Weidi Xie
In CVPR 2026 (Oral | Best Paper Candidate🏆)
[Paper] / [Webpage] / [Code] / [Dataset (soon)]

Multi-Agent System for Comprehensive Soccer Understanding
Jiayuan Rao*, Zifeng Li*, Haoning Wu, Ya Zhang, Yanfeng Wang, Weidi Xie
In ACM Multimedia 2025
[Paper] / [Webpage] / [Code] / [Dataset]

Towards Universal Soccer Video Understanding
Jiayuan Rao*, Haoning Wu*, Hao Jiang, Ya Zhang, Yanfeng Wang, Weidi Xie
In CVPR 2025
[Paper] / [Webpage] / [Code] / [Dataset] / [WeChat]

MatchTime: Towards Automatic Soccer Game Commentary Generation
Jiayuan Rao*, Haoning Wu*, Chang Liu, Yanfeng Wang, Weidi Xie
In EMNLP 2024 (Oral)
[Paper]/ [Webpage] / [Code] / [Demo] / [WeChat]

🚀 Product

MatchMate [Website] / [Join Here]
Your AI live football companion for real-time, personalized match watching. Ask anything during the game and get instant answers with live data, tactical context, and your preferred commentary style. MatchMate brings together second-screen Q&A, automatic stat summaries, customizable voices, and flexible viewing across phone, desktop, full-screen, and multi-match switching.

🕰️ My Past

Child from Lishui, Zhejiang 🏞️
Fortunately from Hangzhou High School 🌸
Exchanged to Madison, Wisconsin

Appreciate all the encounters during my life journey. This homepage is set up on 26/05/2023, I will share some research outcome and random thoughts here ;-)