// the find
junyanz/CatPapers
Cool vision, learning, and graphics papers on Cats!
A paper list maintained by Jun-Yan Zhu (CycleGAN author) collecting computer vision, graphics, and ML papers that happen to use cats in their experiments or results. It's not a survey or tutorial — it's a cheeky index of serious research where cats served as convenient test subjects, spanning GAN image synthesis, 3D reconstruction, fur rendering, and beyond.
The lineage of papers is genuinely good — CycleGAN, pix2pix, StyleGAN, BANMo, and FCN all appear here, so the list functions as an accidental canon of image generation and vision research from 2013–2025. The CSV export (reference.csv) makes it machine-readable if you want to build on it. Each entry has a teaser image and direct arXiv/project links, so it's faster to scan than Google Scholar. The joke is self-aware enough — 'Cat Basis Purrsuit' from SIGBOVIK 2013 is in there — that it doesn't take itself too seriously.
Updates are ad-hoc and slow; the last push was Jan 2026 and the list goes quiet for years at a time, so recent diffusion model work is thin. There's no tagging by subfield, so finding 'papers about 3D cat reconstruction' vs 'papers that just happen to show a cat image' requires reading each entry. The compile_cat_papers.py script generates the HTML but isn't documented, so contributing is friction. Half the paper links point to personal homepages that regularly go dead.