Brandon
Collins

CS & Physics — Auburn University

Undergraduate researcher focused on Computer Vision and Human-AI Interaction. First author on SketchVLM (EMNLP 2026 Main) and co-first author on the PSR dataset (CVPR 2025 Workshop & WACV 2026). Vice President of Auburn's ACM chapter. Former Quantitative Strategist intern at Goldman Sachs.

Brandon Collins
EMNLP 2026 Main

SketchVLM

Brandon Collins*, Logan Bolton*, Hung Huy Nguyen*, Mohammad Reza Taesiri, Trung Bui, Anh Totti Nguyen  · *Equal contribution

First Author

Created a training-free, model-agnostic framework that enables VLMs to draw directly on an image to visually explain their answers.

CVPR 2025 Workshop  ·  WACV 2026

Understanding Generative AI Capabilities
in Everyday Image Editing Tasks

Mohammad Reza Taesiri*, Brandon Collins*, Logan Bolton*, Viet Dac Lai, Franck Dernoncourt, Trung Bui, Anh Totti Nguyen  · *Equal contribution

Co-First Author

We propose the PSR dataset — 305,000 real image-edit requests web-scraped from Reddit — and evaluate state-of-the-art multimodal models including GPT-4o and Gemini, showing AI can complete 33% of real-world editing requests.

Jun – Aug 2026
Quantitative Strategist — FICC & Equities Goldman Sachs · New York City, NY
  • Designed and backtested adverse-selection signals, reducing negative markouts for electronic market-making in interest-rate products.
  • Analyzed dependencies across client analytics jobs to identify critical-path bottlenecks causing processing delays and SLA breaches.
Feb 2025 – Present
Undergraduate Research Assistant — Computer Vision Auburn University · Auburn, AL
  • First author of SketchVLM (accepted at EMNLP 2026 Main), a training-free framework for generating editable visual explanations with VLMs, improving accuracy by up to +28.5 points and annotation quality by up to +48.3% over image-editing and fine-tuned models.
  • Led manuscript writing, implemented Python inference and evaluation, created benchmarks, and built the user demo.
  • Co-first author of Understanding Generative AI Capabilities in Everyday Image Editing Tasks (accepted to CVPR 2025 Workshops and WACV 2026); introduced PSR, a dataset of 305K edits derived from real user image-edit requests, finding SOTA multimodal models complete 33% of requests.
  • Built an automated Python and Playwright pipeline to submit 1,000 image-editing requests through ChatGPT and capture generated outputs before image-editing API access was available.
  • Computing Research Association Undergraduate Research Award — Honorable Mention
Jun – Aug 2024
Technology Intern LPL Financial · Fort Mill, SC
  • Streamlined JIRA status updates for 100+ technology findings through SOPs and remediation plans.
  • Raised executive awareness of 400+ application-security vulnerabilities protecting 20K+ financial advisors.
  • Led stakeholder meetings to accelerate remediation of critical risks.
Aug 2024 – Feb 2025
Engineering Tutor Auburn University · Auburn, AL
  • Coached 40+ students across 8 STEM courses (Calc III, Linear Algebra, Physics, etc.), improving understanding and exam performance.
Aug 2023 – Present
Vice President (previously President, Apr 2024 – Jul 2026) Auburn Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) · Auburn University
  • Manage funds, social events, and company tech talks. Oversee four CSSE clubs serving 300+ students: Competitive Programming, Technical Interview, Web Development, and Ethical Hacking.
Aug 2026 – Present
Coach Auburn Competitive Programming Team · Auburn University
  • Coach 30 students in advanced algorithms, data structures, and contest strategy for ICPC.
  • 1st place — ICPC 2025 University of West Florida Regional D1
  • 1st place — ICPC 2023 University of West Florida Regional D2
Jan 2025 – May 2026
Vice President Technical Interview Club · Auburn University
  • Mentored 50+ members on algorithms, technical interviewing, and the recruiting process.

Open to research collaborations, opportunities, and conversations.

blc0063@auburn.edu