CV
Ivan Puhachov's CV, covering AI engineering, computer graphics research, education, publications, and professional experience.
Contact Information
| Name | Ivan Puhachov |
| Professional Title | AI Engineer |
| Location | Montreal, QC, Canada |
| Website | https://puhachov.xyz/ |
Professional Summary
AI engineer with a PhD in Computer Science. Builds LLMs, VLMs, and AI agents. Published five papers at SIGGRAPH, SIGGRAPH Asia, and Eurographics.
Experience
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Oct 2025 - present Montreal, Canada
AI Engineer
Coverstar, a16z speedrun
- Fine-tuned and deployed a ModernBERT moderation filter on AWS for 15 million monthly comments. Reduced p99.9 latency by 67% while maintaining throughput.
- Fine-tuned a VLM for video moderation and improved frame sampling for blur and low light.
- Built a context-aware LLM moderation agent. Automated warnings and sent bans and escalations for human review. Livestream blocks doubled, and mean response time fell by a reported 40%.
- Built a customer support agent with custom MCP tools, RAG, PII screening, and human review. Covered 200+ daily ticket events and reduced estimated manual labor by 75%.
- Built a voice and text agent with LiveKit, STT, TTS, tool calls, and RAG for user memory. Tested conversation flows and moderation in CI/CD.
- Automated image-to-3D asset generation with Meshy AI, rigging, and diagnostic animation. Cut estimated time to a first draft by about 80%.
- Advised on real-time, on-device avatar lip sync in Unity.
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Oct 2021 - Feb 2024 Montreal, Canada
Research Engineer
Huawei Research, Canada
- Built research demos for generative motion, mesh deformation, scene reconstruction, and digital avatars using NeRF, GANs, diffusion, and Gaussian splatting.
- Led first-author SIGGRAPH Asia 2023 research from synthetic Blender data and computer vision training through optimization, evaluation, and publication.
- Mentored an intern on SIGGRAPH Asia 2024 research. Set up multi-GPU training and experiment tracking with PyTorch Lightning and Weights & Biases.
Publications
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2026 Generative Cutout Animation
Eurographics 2026
Ivan Puhachov, Noam Aigerman, Thibault Groueix, Mikhail Bessmeltsev
Generates editable 2.5D character rigs from text and skeletal motion using SDXL, LoRA, score distillation, and differentiable rendering. -
2024 Neural Implicit Reduced Fluid Simulation
SIGGRAPH Asia 2024
Yuanyuan Tao, Ivan Puhachov, Derek Nowrouzezahrai, Paul Kry
Uses a DeepSDF latent space for fluid simulation. Reports a 1,000× speedup for in-distribution simulations with comparable visual fidelity. -
2023 Reconstruction of Machine-Made Shapes from Bitmap Sketches
SIGGRAPH Asia 2023
Ivan Puhachov, Cedric Martens, Paul G. Kry, Mikhail Bessmeltsev
Reconstructs CAD-like 3D meshes from bitmap sketches using computer vision and patch-based geometric optimization. -
2022 Stability-Aware Simplification of Curve Networks
SIGGRAPH 2022
William Neveu, Ivan Puhachov, Bernard Thomaszewski, Mikhail Bessmeltsev
Selects curves that preserve structural stability under worst-case loads using a greedy approximation. -
2021 Keypoint-Driven Line Drawing Vectorization via PolyVector Flow
SIGGRAPH Asia 2021
Ivan Puhachov, William Neveu, Edward Chien, Mikhail Bessmeltsev
Converts bitmap line drawings into editable vector curves using keypoint detection, graph processing, and PolyVector Flow.
Skills
Education
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Sep 2019 - Aug 2025 Montreal, Canada
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Sep 2013 - Jun 2019 Ukraine, Italy
MSc (cum laude) in Mathematical Engineering and BSc in Mathematics
University of L'Aquila & Kharkiv National University
Mathematical Engineering and Mathematics
- Joint MSc Programme Intermaths
- Thesis: “Catacaustics of surfaces” (advisor: Alexander L. Yampolsky)