Jiarui Sun

Staff Research Scientist

Research areas: Generative machine learning, Representation learning, Spatial-temporal learning, Reinforcement learning

Biography

Dr. Jiarui Sun joined Visa Research as a staff research scientist in March 2025.  Jiarui received his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in 2025. Before joining Visa Research, Jiarui was a Research Assistant at UIUC. His Ph.D. dissertation focused on advancing representation learning techniques on spatial-temporal data from the real world.

As a member of the GenAI foundational team, his research interests include generative machine learning, representation learning, spatial-temporal learning, and reinforcement learning. He has published multiple works in top-tier conferences, including KDD, ECCV, ICRA, CIKM and others.


Publications

  1. Yeh, M. C., Saini, U.S., Dai, X., Fan, X., Jain, S.; Fan, Y., Sun, J., Wang, J., Pan, M., Dou, Y., Chen, Y., Rakesh, V., Wang, L., Zheng, Y., and Das, M. “TREASURE: A transformer-based foundation model for high-volume transaction understanding”. Proceedings of the 32nd ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD) 2026.
  2. Sun, J., Yeh, M. C., Fan, Y., Dai, X., Fan, X., Jiang, Z., Saini, U. S., Lai, V., Wang, J., Chen, H., Zhuang, Z., Zheng, Y., and Chowdhary, G. “EiFormer: Improving Inverted Transformers for Efficient Time Series Forecasting in Large-Scale Spatial-Temporal Data”. IEEE International Conference on Big Data (BigData) 2025.
  3. Sun, J.; Akcal, U. M., Chowdhary, G., and Zhang, W. “MOOSS: Mask-enhanced temporal contrastive learning for smooth state evolution in visual reinforcement learning”. IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV) 2025.
  4. Sun, J., Fan, Y., Yeh, M. C., Zhang, W., and Chowdhary, G. “Revealing the power of masked autoencoders in traffic forecasting”. Proceedings of the 33rd ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM) 2024.
  5. Sun, J., and Chowdhary, G. “CoMusion: Towards Consistent Stochastic Human Motion Prediction via Motion Diffusion”. European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) 2024.
  6. Naughton, N., Sun, J., Tekinalp, A., Parthasarathy, T., Chowdhary, G., and Gazzola, M. “Elastica: A compliant mechanics environment for soft robotic control”. IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (ICRA RAL) 2021.