Internship at PicCollage as a Machine Learning Intern
Hi I’m Allen!
I’m a second-year master’s student at National Taiwan University and joined PicCollage as a Machine Learning Intern from July to December in 2024. To summarize my internship in one word, I would say it was “fulfilling.” PicCollage Company has lots of interesting projects and the ones you work on will directly be used by real users. You can deploy your machine learning codes and get real feedback from users and our project managers. It was an valuable experience since you know exactly what to improve on.?
Team Structure and Collaboration
I worked closely with the MLAD team (Machine Learning, Algorithms, and Data). We had regular syncs to catch up on members’ work. Also, we had lots of opportunities to demo what you were working on to everyone in the company. This meant that you get plenty of technical feedback from engineers and practical feedback from non-engineers. These feedback were quite important since people with different perspectives could help detect different problems in your project.
Project Deep Dive
The project I worked on was Become, an AI-portrait app that transforms your faces into a certain style using AI techniques. We faced several challenges in the development stages, for example,?
These challenges were critical since they directly affected user experience. Take prompting as an example, we looked through works from well-known computer vision conferences and tried several methods to check their performances. The approach we worked with started with a simple prompt and the model augmented that prompt for users. The model was trained using pairs of prompts and scores, helping it to learn which prompts produced better results. When the model did not work as expected, we found other ways, such as prompt inversion techniques, or ensemble multiple methods to achieve better performances.
Mentorship and Support
While work would challenging at times, my coach Anny, also a Machine Learning developer, supported me throughout my internship period. We had weekly 1-on-1s, which not only focused on work but also my daily life. She gave me plenty of autonomy in my work, allowing me to explore different directions. Anny was also a great listener and provided me with constructive feedback when I faced difficulties. I sincerely appreciate her for all the help in my internship!
Company Culture
Holidays are very important to our users as they would use our products to celebrate these moments. We celebrate these holidays internally as well! My most memorable experience was our company outing, in which all of our members went on a two-day trip. Though it was my first time joining any company’s overnight event, it was fantastic, as I got to know other members a lot better.?
Interview Process and Preparation Tips
For anyone interested in joining the company, you definitely need to prepare for the interview. Speaking for myself, there were two online and one onsite interview sessions. The first two sessions were to make sure you have the basic knowledge of deep learning, mostly focusing on CV (computer vision) with some behavioral questions. The onsite interview had a couple more behavioral questions and problem solving sessions. To prepare, I suggest to have a better understanding of what products PicCollage company has and what the company is focusing on. Also, the hard skills, the knowledge and coding skills on deep learning, are required. There were some live coding sections in the interview, so you should know how to code with deep learning frameworks, especially PyTorch.
Key Takeaways
I think PicCollage has a great working environment to improve both technical and non-technical skills. The two important things I learned were problem-solving and communication, both very important for my future career path.?
Thanks again to PicCollage for a great internship experience!