Cecilia Zhang 张璇儿

Phota Labs  ·  ex-Adobe  ·  PhD @ UC Berkeley

cezhang at photalabs dot com

Hiring Phota Labs is building personal models for visual AI. We are a small and mighty team of engineers, researchers, and designers obsessed with storytelling through photos and videos. If you are interested in GenAI, photography, or building visual products, let's chat!

Me

I'm the CEO and co-founder of Phota Labs, where we believe the future of AI is personal, and visual data is a fundamental source to empower it.

Before this, I was a researcher on Marc Levoy's Computational Photography team (employee #1) at Adobe. I built AI-first features (adobe-adaptive-profile, wire-removal) for photographers. We also launched Project Indigo, a computational camera app that pushed the boundaries of computational photography.

I earned my Ph.D. in Computer Science from UC Berkeley in 2020, advised by Ren Ng, and my bachelor's from Rice University, where I focused on computer vision under Ashok Veeraraghavan.

When I'm not coding or training models, I'm usually out with a film camera and an iPhone in hand. Photography has been my constant since I grew up in Beijing, and I still carry it with me wherever I go.

Cecilia Zhang / Publications

  1. LEDiff: Latent Exposure Diffusion for HDR Generation

    Chao Wang, Zhihao Xia, Thomas Leimkuehler, Karol Myszkowski, Xuaner Zhang

    CVPR 2025

  2. Instruction-based Image Manipulation by Watching How Things Move

    Mingdeng Cao, Xuaner Zhang, Yinqiang Zheng, Zhihao Xia

    CVPR 2025 (Highlights)

  3. Explorative Inbetweening of Time and Space

    Haiwen Feng, Zheng Ding, Zhihao Xia, Simon Niklaus, Victoria Abrevaya, Michael J. Black, Xuaner Zhang

    ECCV 2024

  4. Magic Fixup: Streamlining Photo Editing by Watching Dynamic Videos

    Hadi AlZayer, Zhihao Xia, Xuaner Zhang, Eli Shechtman, Jia-Bin Huang, Michael Gharbi

    Arxiv 2024

  5. Restoration by Generation with Constrained Priors

    Zheng Ding, Xuaner Zhang, Zhuowen Tu, Zhihao Xia

    CVPR 2024 (Highlights)

  6. Holo-Relighting: Controllable Volumetric Portrait Relighting from a Single Image

    Yiqun Mei, Yu Zeng, He Zhang, Zhixin Shu, Xuaner Zhang, Sai Bi, Jianming Zhang, HyunJoon Jung, Vishal M. Patel

    CVPR 2024

  7. Dr. Bokeh: DiffeRentiable Occlusion-aware Bokeh Rendering

    Yichen Sheng, Zixun Yu, Lu Ling, Zhiwen Cao, Xuaner Zhang, Xin Lu, Ke Xian, Haiting Lin, Bedrich Benes

    CVPR 2024

  8. Learning Lens Blur Fields

    Esther Y. H. Lin, Zhecheng Wang, Rebecca Lin, Daniel Miau, Florian Kainz, Jiawen Chen, Xuaner Zhang, David B. Lindell, Kiriakos N. Kutulakos

    Arxiv 2023

  9. DiffusionRig: Learning Personalized Priors for Facial Appearance Editing

    Zheng Ding, Xuaner Zhang, Zhihao Xia, Lars Jebe, Zhuowen Tu, Xiuming Zhang

    CVPR 2023

  10. LightPainter: Interactive Portrait Relighting with Freehand Scribble

    Yiqun Mei, He Zhang, Xuaner Zhang, Jianming Zhang, Zhixin Shu, Yilin Wang, Zijun Wei, Shi Yan, HyunJoon Jung, Vishal M. Patel

    CVPR 2023

  11. SunStage: Portrait Reconstruction and Relighting using the Sun as a Light Stage

    Yifan Wang, Aleksander Holynski, Xiuming Zhang, Xuaner Zhang

    CVPR 2023

  12. Automatic High Resolution Wire Segmentation and Removal

    Mang Tik Chiu, Xuaner Zhang, Zijun Wei, Yuqian Zhou, Eli Shechtman, Connelly Barnes, Zhe Lin, Florian Kainz, Sohrab Amirghodsi, Humphrey Shi

    CVPR 2023

  13. Neural Photo-Finishing

    Ethan Tseng, Yuxuan Zhang, Lars Jebe, Xuaner Zhang, Zhihao Xia, Yifei Fan, Felix Heide, Jiawen Chen

    SIGGRAPH Asia 2022

  14. The Implicit Values of A Good Hand Shake: Handheld Multi-Frame Neural Depth Refinement

    Ilya Chugunov, Yuxuan Zhang, Zhihao Xia, Xuaner Zhang, Jiawen Chen, Felix Heide

    CVPR 2022 (Oral)

  15. Time-Travel Rephotography

    Xuan Luo, Xuaner Zhang, Paul Yoo, Ricardo Martin-Brualla, Jason Lawrence, Steven M. Seitz

    SIGGRAPH ASIA 2021

  16. Learned Dual-View Reflection Removal

    Simon Niklaus, Xuaner Zhang, Jonathan T. Barron, Neal Wadhwa, Rahul Garg, Feng Liu, Tianfan Xue

    WACV 2021

  17. Portrait Shadow Manipulation

    Xuaner Zhang, Jonathan T. Barron, Yun-Ta Tsai, Rohit Pandey, Xiuming Zhang, Ren Ng, David E. Jacobs

    SIGGRAPH 2020

  18. Synthetic Defocus and Look-Ahead Autofocus for Casual Videography

    Xuaner Zhang, Kevin Matzen, Vivien Nguyen, Dillon Yao, You Zhang, Ren Ng

    SIGGRAPH 2019

  19. Zoom to Learn, Learn to Zoom

    Xuaner Zhang, Qifeng Chen, Ren Ng, Vladlen Koltun

    CVPR 2019

  20. Single Image Reflection Removal with Perceptual Losses

    Xuaner Zhang, Ren Ng, Qifeng Chen

    CVPR 2018

  21. Photometric stabilization for fast-forward videos

    Xuaner Zhang, Zhaowen Wang, Kalyan Sunkavalli, Joon-Young Lee

    PG 2017

Cecilia Zhang / Blog

Here I write things about the academic and life. Hope you can find some of the pieces resonating.

SIGGRAPH CVPR 2019 CVPR 2018
My Dissertation Interview Resources Asian Rising Star
Ewha Honolulu Yosemite Milky Way
Keynote Customized Opencv2 w/ Cuda9 The Cardboard Effect

Cecilia Zhang / Photography

I love taking photos of streets, people, and random visual attractions. I've been mostly using an iPhone and a film camera. Some of my albums on Flickr.

Here are some of my favorites from recent years.

Beijing, 2024
Beijing on Kodak 200, 2024
Mammoth Lake, 2022
Mammoth Lake, 2022
Hualian, 2014
Hualian, 2014
Death Valley, 2020
Death Valley, 2020
Portland, 2021
Portland, 2021
Crater Lake, 2021
Crater Lake, 2021
Mt Shasta in early fall
Mt Shasta, 2021
Taipei, 2017
Taipei, 2017
Long Beach, 2019
Long Beach, 2019
Dali, China, 2015
Dali, 2015
Las Vegas, 2020
Las Vegas, 2020
Houston, 2015
Houston, 2015
Tokyo, 2015
Tokyo, 2015
Beijing, 2012
Beijing, 2012

See my iPhone collection of 2022:

iPhone collection 2022