2025 began in Hong Kong.

I watched the finale theatrical release of Attack on Titan with my close friends, then walked along the Avenue of Stars at sunset. The sea breeze, the fading light, the aftertaste of the story — it felt like a ceremonial prologue to the entire year.

In April, the AI competition I founded and organized at Sun Yat-sen University — NeuronSpark — officially launched.

160+ teams. 360+ students.
Over ¥100k in sponsorship from Tencent IEG, Huawei, and GpuGeek.

I spent 18 months preparing for it.

It wasn’t just a competition; it was a full-stack system project: problem design, evaluation pipelines, sponsor negotiations, branding, on-site execution. From ideation to delivery, I essentially ran a product. It remains the proudest achievement of my undergraduate years.

In May, under Prof. Chen Pengfei’s supervision, our MLsys paper was accepted to a top-tier systems architecture conference.

We built a non-intrusive profiling system that captures runtime data across Python, PyTorch, LibTorch, CUDA, and NCCL. The core mechanism leverages Linux eBPF to instrument the deep learning stack safely and efficiently.

What started as pure curiosity about MLsys turned into a deep dive into performance paths — kernel launches, communication bottlenecks, cache behavior. The further down the stack I went, the more elegant it became. Slightly nerdy? Definitely. But incredibly rewarding. 🧠⚙️

In June, the competition significantly boosted our organization’s reputation. For the first time since taking over SYSU MSC in 2023, I truly felt institutional recognition.

After multiple discussions with the CEO and CTO of Tanji, we secured a 5-year sponsorship (¥100k per year). That level of long-term trust meant more than the funding itself.

In August, I moved to Beijing (Zhongguancun) for an on-site internship at ByteDance Seed Vision, working on multimodal foundation models.

I contributed to Seedream4.5, Seedance1.5, Seedance2.0, and Seedream5.0.

The competitive pressure was real — nano banana series, hunyuan image 3.0, veo3, keling series — each new release felt like a benchmark sprint. But the team executed brilliantly. We shipped Seedream5.0 and Seedance2.0 right before Lunar New Year, and they sparked significant online momentum. 🚀

It was intense: models, data, scaling laws, distributed training loops. Industrial-grade iteration cycles. I learned more in a few months than I expected.

Academically, I only published three works this year:
• One systems top conference
• One AI top journal
• One technical report at Seed

Not a large number — but the breadth of experience changed my depth of thinking. Returning from industry to academia, I feel an unusual clarity and creative momentum. The next six months should be productive.

Outside work, life was vivid.

I traveled to Xi’an, wandered through Tang Dynasty Night City.
Visited Chaozhou for the Guangji Bridge light show.
Climbed Baiyun Mountain at night in the rain.
Spent three days exploring Dong villages in Guizhou.
Played all day at Happy Valley in Shenzhen.
Went to Halloween night at Guangzhou Chimelong.
Picnicked by Jinshan Lake in Huizhou.
Ended the year in Shanghai attending official League of Legends events.

I also completed my personal quest: visiting all LPL venues in China — Suzhou, Xi’an, Shenzhen, Beijing, Shanghai.

And from 2023 to 2025, I witnessed Faker’s three-peat era in person. That was surreal. 🎮🏆

On Steam, I cleared It Takes Two, Terraria 1.4.5, Final Fantasy VII Remake, and Final Fantasy VII Rebirth.
Balancing virtual worlds and real-world systems somehow made everything richer. 🎧✨

Now I’m about to graduate with a B.Eng. in Computer Science from Sun Yat-sen University and applying for a PhD.

I’m deeply interested in world models and the closed-loop ecosystem of VLA systems. After finishing my internship at Seed in December, I’ve fully returned to academia. This will be my main research direction moving forward.

Happy Chinese New Year 2026. 🧧
May we all build larger systems — and understand them more deeply.