Jack Zhang

CS PhD Student at Brown | Computational Design, Geometry, AI

[Jack Zhang @jackzzhang]

Our takeaway: Don’t just throw an optimizer at arbitrary grammars, design the grammar for descent!
Paper: Design for Descent: What Makes a Shape Grammar Easy to Optimize?
Authors: @milin_k_, @jackzzhang, @nmwsharp, @AdrianaSchulz7
Project: https://t.co/a8hEdmo23M

[Jack Zhang @jackzzhang]

Can we apply gradient descent to discrete changes? In our new #SIGGRAPHAsia paper, we show that gradient descent can work on shape grammars, as in CAD and procedural modeling, but only if the grammars are designed correctly!

[Jack Zhang @jackzzhang]

We show that these properties matter through ablations over grammar variants and compare against existing random-walk approaches like RJMCMC. Grammars that satisfy more of our guidelines consistently converge faster and reach better optima.

[Jack Zhang @jackzzhang]

@_onionesque Linear algebra became category theory, it’s not really taught but at some point we should know everything. And it turns out linear algebra is actually important 🤣

[Jack Zhang @jackzzhang]

@Anthony_Bonato Hatcher my beloved

[Jack Zhang @jackzzhang]

@Anthony_Bonato Real v complex manifolds is another story

[Jack Zhang @jackzzhang]

@keenanisalive Great lecturers I had do all of these on the blackboard, sparingly. One caveat about pictures is that they can lead to bad intuition. For instance if we draw a closed set on the board it’s always a region bounded by a closed curve, but irl closed sets become extremely complex.

[Jack Zhang @jackzzhang]

@EinsteinLeDuc @keenanisalive They can effortlessly create their own intuitions and link examples. In the extremes I’ve seen in class, they can “predict” what theorems come next despite having no prior knowledge of the lesson plan, because they extracted so much information from the definitions given.

[Rana Hanocka @RanaHanocka]

Jack was one of the first students in our group 3DL! He did a couple of awesome works with us during his undergrad. Check out his papers and make sure to follow his journey as he starts as a PhD student in @uwcse with @AdrianaSchulz7 ! https://t.co/d83WyRX2tr

[Jack Zhang @jackzzhang]

@sellan_s To me it feels like the other way around, the surface is an explicit system of equations. And implicit functions can be extracted locally at points on the surface, under conditions by IFT. So these functions (hence their graphs) are implicit in the surface.

[Jack Zhang @jackzzhang]

@Anthony_Bonato Dessin d’enfant

[Jack Zhang @jackzzhang]

@shakked_noy @danielluo_pi Topology is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be unnatural

[Jack Zhang @jackzzhang]

@d0llp4rtsz Underrated

[Jack Zhang @jackzzhang]

@taz_chu Such an amazing book

[Jack Zhang @jackzzhang]

@J_Zane_Miller Unemployed /s

[Jack Zhang @jackzzhang]

@taz_chu But the relationship will still be unoriented

[Jack Zhang @jackzzhang]

@J_Zane_Miller Ah yes, the classic Gaussian smiles