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Brando ZHANG
🧑🏻‍💻 GenAI SDE@TikTok/ByteDance | 🔬 Ex-Research Engineer@Ant/Alibaba

I’m a Generative AI Software Engineer at ByteDance. I build systems that bring generative and multimodal models into creative tools: image and video generation, content understanding, long-running jobs, and the infrastructure behind them.

My path into this work started with computer graphics and 3D vision. I received an M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Southern California in 2023, after a B.E. in Computer Science and Engineering from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen. Along the way, I worked on generative models at TikTok/ByteDance and Ant/Alibaba, and on single-view 3D reconstruction at the Shenzhen Research Institute of Big Data.

These days I am especially interested in the unglamorous part of applied AI: making a promising model dependable enough to become a product. That usually means careful interfaces, recoverable workflows, useful evaluation, and enough observability to understand what happened when things go wrong.

This site began as a place for notes on graphics and deep learning. Those notes are still here. I am also using it to write about the engineering ideas that have stayed useful as my work has moved from research prototypes to creative AI systems.

Current interests

  • Generative and multimodal AI systems
  • Creative tools, graphics, and human-computer interaction
  • Reliable inference services and workflow orchestration
  • Tools that make AI capabilities easier to compose and evaluate

Selected work

One-Shot Generative Domain Adaptation (GenDA)

GenDA teaser

GenDA studies how a GAN pre-trained on one image domain can be adapted to a new domain from as little as one target image. This work was completed during my TikTok/ByteDance internship with Dr. Yujun Shen and Ceyuan Yang.

[Paper] [Code]

VIPNet: Single-view 3D reconstruction

VIPNet is a sparse implicit point-guided approach to reconstructing high-resolution 3D shapes from a single image. It was published at 3DV 2020.

[Project page]

C++ 3D Graphics Renderer

Rotating renderer sample

I built a small OpenGL-like renderer to understand the full path from a 3D model to an image: rasterization, transformations, shading, texturing, and anti-aliasing.

[Code]

Personal creative work

Outside engineering, I also enjoy illustration and visual identity design.

Breakfast poster

Breakfast poster

I made this poster for a campus breakfast activity. Its Chinese title, “早点来吧”, is a small pun: it can mean both “come early” and “come have breakfast.”

STAr logo

This logo was made for Sailboat Test Arena (STAr), a project for testing and guiding autonomous sailboats. The Big Dipper is a nod to both navigation and the project’s name.