My name is Nikitas Chatzis and I am a first year PhD candidate at the Technical University of Crete, advised by prof. Evangelos Kalogerakis. I do research in Computer Graphics, Generative AI and Computer Vision. Lately I have been focusing on the generation of interactive and animatable 3D content, and 4D generation.

In the past I have worked with prof. Symeon Papavassiliou’s team at NTUA, with prof. Aggelos Pikrakis at the University of Piraeus, and also briefly interned at NCSR “Demokritos”.

Recent News

• Sept. 2026: Rigel3D has been accepted at NeurIPS 2026! Stay tuned for code and checkpoint release!

Publications

• Rigel3D: Rig-aware Latents for Animation-Ready 3D Asset Generation
  NeurIPS 2026
  Nikitas Chatzis, Marios Loizou, Evangelos Kalogerakis
  [arxiv] [Code & Webpage Coming Soon]

• Mean-Shift Distillation for Diffusion Mode Seeking
  WACV 2026
  Vikas Thamizharasan, Nikitas Chatzis, Iliyan Georgiev, Matthew Fisher, Evangelos Kalogerakis, Difan Liu, Nanxuan Zhao, Michal Lukac
  [paper] [page]

Pre-prints

Academic Service

• Reviewer: NeurIPS 2026