I’m currently a Senior Applied Scientist in AWS Shanghai AI Lab. I worked for AWS in Palo Alto from Feb. 2018, and moved to Shanghai since Sep. 2019. I got my Master’s degree in Computing Science from Simon Fraser University in 2016, under the supervision of Prof. Martin Ester. My research interests are mainly on computer vision and machine learning.

News

• May 2025: Our papers, Sparse Autoencoders, Again? and Explicit Preference Optimization: No Need for an Implicit Reward Model are accepted by ICML 2025!

• Jan 2025: A few acceptances: Bridging Information Asymmetry in Text-video Retrieval: A Data-centric Approach(paper) has been accepted by ICLR 2025, VideoSAM: Open-World Video Segmentation(paper) has been accepted by ICRA 2025, and Common Learning Constraints Alter Interpretations of Direct Preference Optimization(paper) has been accepted by AISTATS 2025!

• Sep 2024: We have 4 papers, RAGChecker: A Fine-grained Framework for Diagnosing Retrieval-Augmented Generation(paper, repo), Unified Lexical Representation for Interpretable Visual-Language Alignment(paper, repo), Rethinking The Training And Evaluation of Rich-Context Layout-to-Image Generation(paper, repo), and One Token to Seg Them All: Language Instructed Reasoning Segmentation in Videos(paper, repo), accepted by NeurIPS 2024!

• Jun 2024: Our paper, New Desiderata for Direct Preference Optimization(paper) is accepted by ICML 2024 Workshop on Models of Human Feedback for AI Alignment!

• May 2024: Our paper, CaMML: Context-Aware Multimodal Learner for Large Model(paper, repo) is accepted by ACL 2024 Main Conference as an Oral, and has won Area Chair Awards!

Publications

Please refer to Publications.

Open Source Projects

I’m a committer in the following open source projects:

• Deep Graph Library / GluonCV / Apache MXNet / XGBoost

I maintained/created the following R package on CRAN:

• xgboost / SwarmSVM / rLTP / pullword

Work Experience

• Senior Applied Scientist, Amazon Web Services, 2018 - Present
• Embedded Software Developer, Fortinet, 2016 - 2017

Education

• M.S. in Computer Science, School of Computing Science, Simon Fraser University, 2016
• B.S. in Statistics, Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Sun Yat-Sen University, 2013

Selected Awards

• John M. Chambers Statistical Software Award, ASA, 2016
• Special High Energy Physics meets Machine Learning Award, CERN, 2014

Trivia

• There are at least two other researchers named “Tong He” [1], [2], although possibly in different Chinese characters, in the domain of Computer Vision. Please check their profiles if you got confused because some automated systems mistakenly assigned their works to my profile.