ClawPet
A voice-first embodied AI companion with simple physical expression, agent-to-agent chat, and a 3D-printable shell for desktop life.
Tong Zhang Stone
I am a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at Fudan University, advised by Prof. Tao Xie and Prof. Wei Yang. Previously, I received my M.S. in Computer Engineering from the University of California, Irvine and my B.Eng. from the Southern University of Science and Technology.
My research focuses on Coding Agent and Multimodal Reasoning. Feel free to get in touch!
I believe the most exciting frontiers for AI are curiosity — efficient data intervention — and abstraction — the structure of knowledge.
“What magical trick makes us intelligent? The power of intelligence stems from our vast diversity, not from any single, perfect principle.”
— Marvin Minsky, The Society of Mind
MockMyInterview
An AI-powered mock interview experience for practicing technical and behavioral interviews with interactive feedback.
LaTeX Blog Template
A reusable LaTeX blog system template with blog-style landing pages, automated compilation, and GitHub Pages deployment.
GEB-Bench: Abstract Structures Told in Many Voices
A benchmark whose unit is an abstract structural motif — self-reference, a strange loop, a Möbius twist — each told in several voices: a natural scene, a folk story, a theorem, and a programmatic skeleton. Models recognize a structure within one voice far better than they carry it across voices. Fully generative and released with its pipeline.
When LLM Defenses Backfire: Characterizing Safety, Performance, and Cost Trade-offs
A systematic study of how jailbreak defenses trade off safety against task performance, over-refusal, and inference cost. Benchmarks 11 defenses across 6 open-source LLMs and 5 datasets, organizing them by operational strategy to expose their deployment-time side effects.
When Does Recurrence Become an Algorithm? Convergence Selection in Weight-Tied Looped Transformers
When does a weight-tied looped transformer — one block applied T times — implement an actual algorithm? Identifies a budget law pricing the learned frontier’s speed by the training contract, and introduces a convergence-time instrument τ(n, i) that predicts out-of-distribution fate where standard metrics saturate.
Beyond Pixels: Human-Readable SVG Generation
Developed S²VG², an innovative method integrating vision language models for scalable vector graphics (SVG) generation.
For a more complete publication list, please see my CV.
Tong Zhang, Zhiyuan Shi, Yun Peng, and Tao Xie, “GEB-Bench: Abstract Structures Told in Many Voices”, Preprint, 2026.
Tong Zhang, Zexin Li, Simin Chen, and Yun Peng, “When LLM Defenses Backfire: Characterizing Safety, Performance, and Cost Trade-offs”, Under Review.
Tong Zhang, Junhao Hu, Yun Peng, and Tao Xie, “When Does Recurrence Become an Algorithm? Convergence Selection in Weight-Tied Looped Transformers”, Preprint, 2026.
Sinin Zhang, Yunfei Xie, Yuxuan Cheng, Haoyu Zhang, and Tong Zhang, “PhysNote: Self-Knowledge Notes for Evolvable Physical Reasoning in Vision-Language Model”, ES-Reasoning @ ICLR, 2026.
Tong Zhang, Haoyang Liu, Peiyan Zhang, Yuxuan Cheng, and Haohan Wang, “Beyond Pixels: Exploring Human-Readable SVG Generation for Simple Images with Vision Language Models”, Preprint, 2024.
Haoyu Ma, Tong Zhang, Shanlin Sun, Xiangyi Yan, Kun Han, and Xiaohui Xie, “CVTHead: One-shot Controllable Head Avatar with Vertex-feature Transformer”, IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2024.
Bu Jin, Xinyu Liu, Yupeng Zheng, Pengfei Li, Hao Zhao, Tong Zhang, Yuhang Zheng, Guyue Zhou, and Jingjing Liu, “ADAPT: Action-aware Driving Caption Transformer”, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2023.
Sep. 2025 – Dec. 2025
Research Intern
Developed a WeChat Mini Program agent based on vision-language models, and designed agent memory together with experience extraction mechanisms.
May 2025 – Aug. 2025
Research Intern
Proposed an energy-based attention refinement method for image editing, and explored generate–reflect–reason loops for multi-round controllable optimization.
Nov. 2024 – Apr. 2025
Research Intern
Studied defense mechanisms for large language models, their side effects, and token compression for audio language models.
May 2022 – Sep. 2022
Lightweight OCR Models for OpenCV
Implemented PP-OCRv2 detection in OpenCV Zoo, high-level C++ APIs, and evaluation metrics for text detection.
Education
- Fudan University · Ph.D. in Computer Science · 2025–Present
- UC Irvine · M.S. in Computer Engineering · 2023–2024
- SUSTech · B.Eng. in Computer Science and Engineering · 2019–2023
Personal Notes
- Hometown: Wuhan
- Idol: Richard Feynman
- Favorite book: Gödel, Escher, Bach
- Favorite song: Méditation from Thaïs