Tao Sun

images/bio.jpg

Hi! I am an Applied Scientist at Amazon. My work focuses on AI agents, multi-modal models, in particular for shopping scenarios.

I received Ph.D. in Computer Science at Stony Brook University advised by Prof. Haibin Ling in 2024.

I am broadly interested in machine learning and computer vision, particularly AI agents, vision-language learning, domain adaptation, weakly-supervised learning. I also work on adversarial attack and defense of neural networks.

Contact: taosun.ai # gmail.com


News

Apr 2025 Our project Buy for Me shopping agent was launched!
Nov 2024 Started working as Applied Scientist at Amazon, Seattle!
Nov 2024 Successfully defended my PhD thesis.

Selected publications

  • LLaVA-RE: Binary image-text relevancy evaluation with multimodal large language model
    Tao Sun, Oliver Liu, JinJin Li, Lan Ma
    EvalMG 2025    |    Paper  •  arXiv
  • Mask and Restore: Blind Backdoor Defense at Test Time with Masked Autoencoder
    Tao Sun, Lu Pang, Chao Chen, Weimin Lyu, and Haibin Ling
    arXiv 2023    |    arXiv  •  Code
  • Local Context-Aware Active Domain Adaptation
    Tao Sun, Cheng Lu, and Haibin Ling
    ICCV 2023    |    Paper  •  arXiv  •  Code
  • Backdoor Cleansing with Unlabeled Data
    Lu Pang, Tao Sun, Haibin Ling, and Chao Chen
    CVPR 2023    |    Paper  •  arXiv  •  Code
  • Domain Adaptation with Adversarial Training on Penultimate Activations
    Tao Sun, Cheng Lu, and Haibin Ling
    AAAI 2023    |    Oral Presentation  •  Paper  •  arXiv  •  Code
  • Prior Knowledge Guided Unsupervised Domain Adaptation
    Tao Sun, Cheng Lu, and Haibin Ling
    ECCV 2022    |    Paper  •  arXiv  •  Code
  • Safe Self-Refinement for Transformer-Based Domain Adaptation
    Tao Sun, Cheng Lu, Tianshuo Zhang, and Haibin Ling
    CVPR 2022    |    Paper  •  arXiv  •  Code

Industry experience

Applied Scientist, Amazon Shopping (Nov. 2024 - )

Applied Scientist Intern, Amazon Shopping (May 2024 - Aug. 2024)

Multimodal LLM, Instruction tuning, Agents

Machine Learning Engineer Intern, Adobe DX (May 2023 - Aug. 2023)

Time series forecasting

Machine Learning Engineer, Ant Group (July 2018 - July 2019)

Recommender system

Software Engineer Intern, Baidu NLP (Sept. 2017 - Dec. 2017)

News matching


Service

Reviewer: ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML, ICCV, CVPR, ECCV, AISTATS, ACCV, WACV, AAAI, MM, TPAMI, IJCV, TNNLS