PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Liang-Chieh Chen

Also known as Jay Chen

Liang-Chieh Chen is a computer-vision researcher whose work spans semantic and panoptic segmentation, mobile vision, and visual generation. He coauthored DeepLab for pixel-level image segmentation, contributed to MobileNetV2, and helped develop later DeepLab models at Google Research. After completing a UCLA PhD in 2015, he spent seven years at Google Research and held research roles at ByteDance Research/TikTok and Amazon; a 2026 ICBS award recognized the DeepLab paper he coauthored. As of October 2026, he is a research scientist at Apple AI/ML, building visual generative models.

Now at
Apple
Badges

Timeline

  1. 2014–2015

    DeepLab and a UCLA PhD

    Chen coauthors a 2014 DeepLab paper on semantic image segmentation that combines deep convolutional networks with a fully connected conditional random field to improve segment localization. He earns an MS in electrical and computer engineering at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and completes a UCLA computer-science PhD under Alan L. Yuille in 2015.

  2. 2016–2023

    Research Scientist at Google

    He works as a research scientist at Google Research in Los Angeles from 2016 to 2023.

  3. 2018

    DeepLab-v3+ and MobileNetV2

    Google Research releases its DeepLab-v3+ TensorFlow model as open source in 2018, and Chen and Yukun Zhu write the release post. The group also credits him as a core contributor to MobileNetV2, a model family for mobile vision.

  4. 2020

    Panoptic-DeepLab for segmentation

    In 2020, he and Bowen Cheng present Panoptic-DeepLab, which predicts semantic and instance segmentation in parallel without overlap and enables near-real-time panoptic prediction.

  5. 2021

    MaX-DeepLab and ViP-DeepLab

    In 2021, he coauthors MaX-DeepLab, which predicts class-labeled masks end to end with a dual-path transformer. He also coauthors ViP-DeepLab, a unified model for video panoptic segmentation and monocular depth estimation.

  6. 2023–2025

    Roles at ByteDance and Amazon

    He works as a research scientist and manager at ByteDance Research/TikTok from 2023 to 2025 and serves as Amazon's senior principal scientist in 2025. In 2025, he coauthors xAR, a generalized autoregressive framework that extends the notion of a token to an entity X.

  7. 2026

    A Frontiers of Science Award

    In 2026, he shares the International Congress for Basic Science Frontiers of Science Award with Alan Yuille, George Papandreou, Iasonas Kokkinos and Kevin Murphy for their 2017 DeepLab paper.

  8. As of October 2026

    Research Scientist at Apple AI/ML

    He is a research scientist at Apple AI/ML, where he builds visual generative models. In August 2026, he coauthors research on outlier tokens in diffusion transformers for image generation.

Career

  1. NowAppleResearch Scientist
  2. 2025AmazonSenior Principal Scientist
  3. 2023–2025ByteDanceResearch Scientist and Manager
  4. 2016–2023Google ResearchResearch Scientist

Education

  1. 2015University of California, Los AngelesPhD
  2. University of MichiganMS

From the biography.

  1. Of 943 people shaping AI who worked at Google, 446 work there nowIncludes Liang-Chieh Chen. Our estimates of where the 943 people shaping AI who worked at Google and Google DeepMind work now: 446 at Google and 452 across 278 other organizations.
  2. Google alumni have founded or led 133 other organizations, more than any other AI labIncludes Liang-Chieh Chen. We estimate that alumni of 17 major AI labs went on to found or lead 350 other organizations, including 226 they founded, and we trace 472 career moves directly between 23 labs since 2010.
  3. Among employers with 30+ full-time cases, OpenAI leads primary technical role H-1B pay at $310,000, and Amazon, Google and Microsoft file 57% of all casesIncludes Apple. Across 440,669 certified US H-1B filings from 44 employers (FY2020–FY2026), OpenAI leads primary technical role base pay at $310,000 and xAI leads overall base pay at $290,000.
  4. The top 10 organizations employed 22% of people shaping AI in 2025: 51% of company researchers and 21% of university researchersIncludes Apple. We estimate the share of people shaping AI who worked at the top 10 organizations each year from 1955 to 2025, comparing concentration across companies, universities, and institutes and labs.

Colleagues

People named in this biography, and people with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Liang-Chieh Chen yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets and Fully Connected CRFs arxiv.org. Checked 20 October 2026.
  2. Liang-Chieh (Jay) Chen- Home Page liangchiehchen.com. Checked 20 October 2026.
  3. Semantic Image Segmentation with DeepLab in TensorFlow research.google. Checked 20 October 2026.
  4. MobileNetV2: The Next Generation of On-Device Computer Vision Networks research.google. Checked 20 October 2026.
  5. Improving Holistic Scene Understanding with Panoptic-DeepLab research.google. Checked 20 October 2026.
  6. MaX-DeepLab: Dual-Path Transformers for End-to-End Panoptic Segmentation research.google. Checked 20 October 2026.
  7. Holistic Video Scene Understanding with ViP-DeepLab research.google. Checked 20 October 2026.
  8. Beyond Next-Token: Next-X Prediction for Autoregressive Visual Generation arxiv.org. Checked 20 October 2026.
  9. Yuille team receives 2026 ICBS Frontiers of Science Award cs.jhu.edu. Checked 20 October 2026.
  10. Taming Outlier Tokens in Diffusion Transformers machinelearning.apple.com. Checked 20 October 2026.