Yunzhi Lin

Yunzhi Lin

I build ML systems for video understanding and robotics 🤖📹💡


I work at the intersection of perception and decision-making — teaching models to understand what they're seeing well enough to act on it. In research, that meant 6-DoF object pose from a single image, pose tracking in dynamic scenes, NeRF-based pose optimization, and grounding natural-language commands in robot behavior. In industry, it means turning those ideas into video-understanding and recommendation models that run at billion-user scale.

Most of what I care about lives in the translation problem: the gap between a working research prototype and a reliable production system is usually larger than the gap between two papers. My work is shaped by moving between both sides — from a GPU cluster in a research lab to a ranking stack serving hundreds of millions of daily requests.


2024 – Present
TikTok
Machine Learning Engineer at TikTok, focused on video understanding and live e-commerce recommendation at billion-user scale. I design and scale intent-aware models that optimize engagement across global markets, contribute to millions in daily GMV, and translate research prototypes into production systems with real latency, reliability, and cost constraints.
2023
Meta
Research Intern at Meta FAIR Accel, Ego-HowTo team, working with Kevin Liang and Matt Feiszli on egocentric video understanding.
2020 – 2022
NVIDIA
Two research internships with the NVIDIA Learning and Perception Research group (May 2020–May 2021, and May 2022–Dec 2022), mentored by Stan Birchfield and collaborating with Jonathan Tremblay, Stephen Tyree, and Bowen Wen. Work on this span produced CenterPose, CenterPoseTrack, Parallel NeRF for pose estimation, and related 6-DoF perception papers.
2018 – 2024
Georgia Tech
Ph.D. and M.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology, advised by Patricio A. Vela at the Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines. Thesis work on 3D perception, 6-DoF pose estimation and tracking, and human–robot interaction.
2017
University of Alberta
Visiting researcher at the Applied Nonlinear Control Lab, University of Alberta, with Alan Lynch. Image-based visual servoing on a quadrotor; PX4 firmware work.
2014 – 2018
Southeast University
B.E. in Automation from Southeast University, advised by Wenze Shao and Yangang Wang. Early work on image motion deblurring and ear keypoint detection.

Selected publications

Full list on Google Scholar.

OmniPose6D: Towards Short-Term Object Pose Tracking in Dynamic Scenes from Monocular RGB
/ IROS 2025
Yunzhi Lin, Yipu Zhao, Fu-Jen Chu, Xingyu Chen, Weiyao Wang, Hao Tang, Patricio A. Vela, Matt Feiszli, Kevin Liang
Parallel Inversion of Neural Radiance Fields for Robust Pose Estimation
/ ICRA 2023
Yunzhi Lin, Thomas Müller, Jonathan Tremblay, Bowen Wen, Stephen Tyree, Alex Evans, Patricio A. Vela, Stan Birchfield
Keypoint-Based Category-Level Object Pose Tracking from an RGB Sequence with Uncertainty Estimation
/ ICRA 2022
Yunzhi Lin, Jonathan Tremblay, Stephen Tyree, Patricio A. Vela, Stan Birchfield
Single-Stage Keypoint-based Category-level Object Pose Estimation from an RGB Image
/ ICRA 2022
Yunzhi Lin, Jonathan Tremblay, Stephen Tyree, Patricio A. Vela, Stan Birchfield
Multi-view Fusion for Multi-level Robotic Scene Understanding
/ IROS 2021
Yunzhi Lin, Jonathan Tremblay, Stephen Tyree, Patricio A. Vela, Stan Birchfield
Using Synthetic Data and Deep Networks to Recognize Primitive Shapes for Object Grasping
/ ICRA 2020
Yunzhi Lin, Chao Tang, Fujen Chu, Patricio A. Vela

linyunzhi1996 [at] gmail [dot] com  ·  Google Scholar  ·  GitHub  ·  Twitter