Lin Zhang 张林

I am a third-year CS PhD student at University of Wisconsin–Madison, supervised by Yin Li. I am grateful to have been mentored by Pedro Morgado at Skild AI, Yuheng Li and Jiuxiang Gu at Adobe Research.

Previously, I graduated from the MSCV program at Carnegie Mellon University, supervised by Fernando de la Torre and Shayok Chakraborty. I received my B.S. in CS and Math from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology with First Class Honors, supervised by Chi-Keung Tang and Yu-Wing Tai.

Research Interests

I am interested in building multi-modal generative models, including:

  • Controllability: generating visual content that precisely follows multi-modal conditions such as text and audio — e.g., animating images in sync with sound (ASVA)
  • Training & scalability: designing efficient training recipes that scale generative models to larger sizes, more data, and new capabilities (OpenASVA, UniTemp)
  • Efficiency: reducing the memory and compute cost of generative models at both training and inference time, towards fast few-step generation (UniTemp)

Selected Publications

Equal advising

arXiv 2026

UniTemp: Unlocking Video Generation in Any Temporal Order via Bidirectional Distillation

Lin Zhang, Sicheng Mo, Zefan Cai, Jinhong Lin, Zihao Lin, Jiuxiang Gu, Krishna Kumar Singh, Yuheng Li, Yin Li

arXiv 2025 Scaling Up Audio-Synchronized Visual Animation teaser

Scaling Up Audio-Synchronized Visual Animation: An Efficient Training Paradigm

Lin Zhang, Zefan Cai, Yufan Zhou, Shentong Mo, Jinhong Lin, Cheng-En Wu, Yibing Wei, Yijing Zhang, Ruiyi Zhang, Wen Xiao, Tong Sun, Junjie Hu, Pedro Morgado

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Education

University of Wisconsin–Madison

PhD in Computer Science

Aug 2023 – May 2028 (expected)

Carnegie Mellon University

MSc in Computer Vision

Aug 2021 – Dec 2022

ETH Zurich

Undergraduate Exchange

Sep 2018 – Jun 2019

Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

BSc in CS & Math, First Class Honors

Sep 2016 – Jun 2020

Experience

Adobe Research

Jun 2025 – Jan 2026

AWS Rekognition

May 2022 – Aug 2022

ByteDance AI Lab

Feb 2021 – Jun 2021

MEGVII

Jan 2020 – Apr 2020