He Zhang, Adobe Research

I am a senior research scientist at Adobe Research working on MLLM for image/video generation and editing. I was a computer vision engineer working at Apple Vision Pro. I did my PhD advised by Vishal M. Patel.

[CV] [Linkedin][Google Scholar][Github][Twitter]

Research Intern Hiring for Summer 2026 : Please feel free to contact me if you are interested in working with me on a research project in Multi-Model Foundational Model.

Adobe University collaboration: feel free to email me, if you share similar interests in editing for images, videos and texts!

I turn research into high-quality products through data–model co-design, leading features that power Adobe’s portfolio across the pre-GenAI (such as Select Subject) and post-GenAI era (such as Harmonize and Reference Image) . All of this contribute to my 2025 Tech Excellence Award in Adobe.

News:
07/25: Harmonize is shipped to Adobe Products with many media coverages:
The Verge, TechCrunch, Forbes, CNET, ZDNET, Creative Bloq, Digital Camera World

07/25: OmniVCus is released and accepted in NeurIPS'25

07/25: Two paper including DiffusionGS accepted in ICCV'25.

06/25: Area Chair for ICLR'26, CVPR'26 , WACV'26.

02/25: Four paper including Unireal accepted in CVPR'25.

02/25: Diffusion Model-Based Image Editing: A Survey got accepted in T-PAMI.

01/25: OS-refinement and Relighting-GS got accepted in ICLR'25.

11/24: Our composition prototype is demoed at Max Sneak 2024.

07/24: Generative Portrait Shadow Removal got accepted in Siggraph Asia'24.

07/24: Two paper got accepted in ECCV'24.

02/24: Three paper got accepted in CVPR'24. Relightful Harmonization, Relighting Nerf and Object Stitch V2.

Email: he.zhang92@rutgers.edu or hezhan@adobe.com
(not hezhang@adobe.com)

Publications:

2023:

Y. Mei, He Zhang, X Zhang, J Zhang, Z Shu, Y Wang, Z Wei, S Yan, H Jung, V. M. Patel, "LightPainter: Interactive Portrait Relighting with Freehand Scribble", CVPR 2023
Y. Shen, J.Zhang, J.Philip, Y.Hold-Geoffroy, X.Sun, He Zhang, Lu Ling, Bedrich Benes"PixHt-Lab: Pixel Height Based Light Effect Generation for Image Compositing", CVPR 2023
K. Wang, M.Gharbi, He Zhang, Z.Xia, E.Shechtman, "Semi-supervised Parametric Real-world Image Harmonization", CVPR, 2023
Jeya Maria Jose, He Zhang, Jianming Zhang, Yilin Wang, Zhe Lin , Jose Echevarria, Yinglan Ma, Zijun Wei, Kalyan Sunkavalli, and Vishal M. Patel, Interactive Portrait Harmonization, ICLR 2023
Lingzhi Zhang, Zhengjie Xu, Connelly Barnes, Yuqian Zhou, Qing Liu, He Zhang, Sohrab Amirghodsi, Zhe Lin, Eli Shechtman, Jianbo Shi, Perceptual Artifacts Localization for Image Synthesis Tasks, ICCV 2023
Sihan Ma, Jizhizi Li, Jing Zhang, He Zhang, Dacheng Tao, Rethinking portrait matting with privacy preserving, IJCV
Jing Gu, Yilin Wang, Nanxuan Zhao, Tsu-Jui Fu, Wei Xiong, Qing Liu, Zhifei Zhang, He Zhang, Jianming Zhang, HyunJoon Jung, Xin Eric Wang, Photoswap: Personalized subject swapping in images, Neurips 2023
Yi Huang, Yu Dong, He Zhang, Jiancheng Huang, Shifeng Chen, Learning Image-Adaptive Lookup Tables With Spatial Awareness for Image Harmonization, IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics

2022&Before:

Please refer to my Google Scholar

Product Highlights:

At Adobe, He is the main contributor for the following shipped features:

Select Subject Cloud shipped in Photoshop (Link) its Updated Select Subject is released
Harmonize is shipped to Adobe Products with many media coverages:
The Verge, TechCrunch, Forbes, CNET, ZDNET, Creative Bloq, Digital Camera World
Select Subject Portrait feature in 2020 Photoshop Release and 2021 Lightroom Release.
Refine Hair feature shipped in 2020 Adobe MAX.
Harmonization Filter shipped in 2021 Adobe MAX and other features in other products.
Remove Background shipped in Adobe Express in 2022.
Improve the segmentation quality on hair/fur region for Auto-masking (link) in Adobe Photoshop 2022

And also more features in other products.

More news:

07/23: Photoswap: Personalized subject swapping in images is accepted in NeurIPS'23.

07/23: Perceptual Artifacts Localization for Image Synthesis Tasks is accepted in ICCV'23.

03/23: Rethinking portrait matting with privacy preserving is accepted in IJCV
(International Journal of Computer Vision)

02/23: Three paper got accepted in CVPR'23 on Relighting, Harmonization and Shadow/reflection synthesis.

01/23: Interactive Portrait Harmonization got accepted in ICLR 2023. Check out the project page.

07/22: One paper got accepted in ECCV'2022.

05/22: Best Paper Award !! "Image De-Raining Using a Conditional Generative Adversarial Network" receives the 2022 IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology Best Paper Award.

03/22: Two paper got accepted at CVPR'2022. 1. Lite Vision Transformer with Enhanced Self-Attention 2. Boosting Robustness of Image Matting with Context Assembling and Strong Data Augmentation

07/21: SSH: A Self-Supervised Framework for Image Harmonization is accepted in ICCV'2021

03/21: MGMatting is accepted in CVPR'2021. Our dataset and code can be found in the link.

04/25: Object Insertion is demoed on Adobe Summit: link

12/24: Text2Relight got accepted in AAAI'25.

11/22: Select Subject Cloud shipped in Photoshop (Link)

11/22: Semi-supervised Domain Alignment Learning for Single Image Dehazing got accepted in IEEE Transections on Cybernetics.

10/21: Harmonization Filter is shipped in 2021 Adobe MAX

03/21: One paper is accepted in IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics.

10/20: Refine Hair (combined with Object-aware Refine Edge) is shipped at 2020 Adobe MAX where an automatic trimap generation procedure is proposed. PiXimperfect **Check out others amazing features shipped by our group in this video PiXimperfect like amazing Sky replacement, amazing content-aware tracing.

10/20: One paper is accepted in WACV'2021.

06/20: My first feature in Photoshop. Select Subject Portrait is shipped in 2020 Photoshop June Release. Design an efficient framework for automatic high-quality portrait segmentation (with matted hair details ) running on-device. [PiXimperfect] [PHLEARN]

11/19: One paper 'Generative Adversarial Networks with Fusion-discriminator for Single Image Dehazing' is accepted in AAAI'2020.

Working Experiences:

Senior Research Scientist (Adobe, CA) 05.2019 - Now
Research Scientist II
Research Scientist
Computer Vision Engineer (Apple, CA) 2018-2019
Research Intern (Adobe Research, CA) 2018
Research Intern (Siemens Healthneer, NJ) 2017

Selected Academic Services:

Journal Reviewer: TPAMI, IJCV, TIP, TMM, PR, TCSVT and etc.
Conference Reviewer: CVPR'19,20,21,22,23 ICCV'19,21,23 , ECCV'18,20,22, BMVC'18,19,20,21,22 WACV'19,20,21, ACCV'18

Former Interns:

I have been fortunate to collaborate with these great students:

Shilong Zhang HKU, 2025
Xiang Wang HUST, 2025
Yuanhao Cai John Hopkins University, 2024
Xi Chen HKU, 2024
Mengwei Ren New York University, 2023 --> Research Scientist at Adobe
Andrew Hou MSU, 2023 --> Research Scientist at Meta
Yizhi Song Purdue University, 2023 --> Applied Scientist at Amazon
Yiqun Mei John Hopkins University, 2022 --> Research Scientist at Adobe
Ke Wang University of California, Berkeley, 2022 --> Research Scientist at Adobe
Yutong Dai Adelaide University, 2021 --> Research Scientist at Sony
Yifan Liu Adelaide University, 2021
Yichen Sheng Purdue University, 2021 --> Research Scientist at Nvidia Research
Jeya Maria Jose John Hopkins University, 2020 --> Senior Researcher at Microsoft
Qihang Yu John Hopkins University, 2020 --> Research Scientist at Tiktok
Chenglin Yang John Hopkins University, 2020,2021 --> Research Scientist at Tiktok
Yifan Jiang UT Austin, 2019 --> Senior Research Scientist at Apple