AI Systems / ML Engineer

Tianao (Owen) Zeng

I build production-oriented AI systems across LLMs, generative models, and multimodal perception. My work spans AI infrastructure, data pipelines, and applied research.

GitHub LinkedIn Scholar Email

Training

Education

Carnegie Mellon University

Master of Science, Artificial Intelligence Engineering - Electrical and Computer Engineering

Expected Dec. 2026

Pittsburgh, PA | GPA 3.95/4.0

Coursework: Large Language Models, Deep Generative Models, GPU Acceleration, Computer Vision

University of Southern California

Bachelor of Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering

Jan. 2023 - May 2025

Los Angeles, CA | GPA 3.76/4.0

Coursework: Verilog, Computer Systems, Networks, Electromagnetism, Embedded Systems, Internet of Things

AI evaluation and systems engineering

Work Experience

Abundant

Jun. 2026 - Aug. 2026

Software Engineer Intern | San Francisco, CA

Built AI-agent benchmarks and RL task environments for frontier labs, focused on long-horizon DevOps/SRE incidents.

Designed incident task families with shared symptoms but distinct root causes and hidden verifiers, testing agents' ability to investigate service state while resisting memorized fixes and shortcut solutions.
Built reproducible Docker and Kubernetes evaluation environments to measure agents' ability to investigate and resolve multi-service incidents using simulated tickets, logs, dashboards, and APIs.
Automated task setup, model runs, failure analysis, and benchmark packaging; hardened evaluation runtimes and shipped visual review tooling to distinguish model limitations from environment or verifier failures.

AbundantAI-agent evalsRL environmentsDevOps/SREDocker / Kubernetes

XPENG Motors

May 2024 - Aug. 2024

Software Engineer Intern | San Diego, CA

Worked on infrastructure observability, runtime visualization, OCR triage, and development pipeline isolation.

Visualized infrastructure runtime across Kubernetes clusters and reduced idle PostgreSQL database connections by 70 percent.
Built OCR-based text detection and triage from input video using OpenCV, then improved runtime with multiprocessing.
Implemented a development pipeline that separated testing workflows from production runs.

KubernetesPostgreSQLOpenCVmultiprocessing

Applied ML research

Research Experience

Control & Learning Group at CMU

May 2026 - Sep 2026

Research Assistant, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering | Remote / Pittsburgh, PA

Built and validated robot manipulation data pipelines for VLA and robot-learning research using Unitree G1/Dex1 simulation, LIBERO-style tasks, and LeRobot/OpenPI-compatible datasets.

Collected and packaged 1,500 successful robot manipulation episodes across 3 tasks with synchronized trajectory data, success metadata, and video observations.
Built LeRobot/OpenPI-style dataset outputs for downstream training, including state-action trajectories, task metadata, and multi-camera rollout videos.
Debugged simulation failures through logs and rollout videos, including an end-effector site mismatch and memory pressure in long-running collection jobs.

Details Control & Learning GroupVLArobot learningUnitree G1LeRobot

Khan Lab at USC

Jun. 2023 - Aug. 2025

Individual Researcher under Dr. Khan, Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering | Los Angeles, CA

Built software, firmware, data processing, and ML analysis workflows for EEG-based cognitive and affective-state experiments.

Developed an EEG software interface with Stroop, math, and video-feedback tests in Python.
Designed and tested firmware for a custom EEG collection ADC board in C++.
Conducted experiments with mentors, collected data through custom EEG software, and processed results in Jupyter Notebook.

Details Khan LabEEGwearablesPythonC++

AI systems focus

Featured Projects

View all

2026

Asynchronous LLM Reinforcement Learning Under Constrained Hardware

A from-scratch AReaL-style async RL system for Qwen 2.5-0.5B on 2 V100 GPUs, studying bounded staleness, policy lag, and learning efficiency under constrained hardware.

LLM systems
reinforcement learning
distributed training
infrastructure

2026

OmniPaint Reproducibility Study for Object-Oriented Diffusion Editing

An ICCV 2025 reproducibility study of OmniPaint, validating removal metrics on the public benchmark and exposing insertion benchmark sensitivity with public substitute data.

generative models
diffusion
reproducibility
image editing

2026

Robust Perception for Autonomous Vehicles: Camera-Only vs. Camera+LiDAR Fusion

A CARLA closed-loop robustness study comparing YOLOv8n camera-only perception with RGB+LiDAR PointPainting-style fusion under weather, viewpoint, and adversarial stress.

multimodal perception
autonomous vehicles
sensor fusion
robustness

Publication

Selected Publication

View all

2022Published conference chapter

EMG-Based View Controller Using VR Applications

Jingcheng Zhao, Anjun Zhang, Tianao Zeng, Hao Cai, et al.

Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Signal Processing and Information Communications

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-13181-3_4

Built and evaluated an EMG-driven VR view controller with real-time Unity3D testing, achieving approximately 96.5 percent initial classification accuracy across five head-movement directions.

DOI Google Scholar