I’m Lily Zhang (publishing as Xianling Zhang), a Technical Lead / Applied Research Scientist in the Bay Area, California.
At Latitude AI, I am building the data flywheel for autonomy: reason and interact with unstructured data (VLM-based retrieval and curation, efficient auto-labeling, and data generation at large scale). Previously, I led applied R&D at Ford Greenfield Labs (2019–2023) on training perception models, controllable scene generation. Before that, I was a Machine Learning Engineer at BMW working on perception.
My past research has involved post-training, data-centric deep learning [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]. As a side open-source project, I built Deep-Seek, an LLM-powered retrieval engine that became GitHub's #1 rated data retrieval repository.
You can reach me at lilyzhng.ai AT gmail.com.