Vitae

Education

• Ph.D in Computer Science, University of Delaware, 2027 (expected)
• B.S. in Computer Science, Texas Christian University, 2021

Research Experience

• Research Assistant (AACS Lab, UDelaware. Jan 2025 - Present)
  • QAOA Parameter Transferability from MaxCut to MIS (in submission, preprint)
• Research Assistant (Deep-REAL, UDelaware. Aug 2021 - Dec 2024)
  • Continual Test-Time Adaptation [CIKM’24]
  • Failure Detection for Vision-Language Models [AAAI’25 Oral]
  • Trustworthy AI for Improvement of Seafloor Data Intelligence [NeurIPS’24]
• Undergraduate Research Assistant (VEC Lab, UNT. May 2020 - Dec 2020)
  • Dynamic Convolution Neural Network [ICME’21 Oral]
• Undergraduate Research Assistant (TCU. Dec 2018 - May 2021)
  • Optimal Play Behavioral Analysis on AlphaGo Zero [IPCCC’20]

Work Experience

• Back-end Developer (TCU, Jun 2019 - May 2021)
  • EurekaLabs is a hands on security learning platform that assisted students with open-source, easy-to-use and hands-on cybersecurity materials. It has attracted around 70K views on lab materials.
  • I developed and maintained the website for a while.

Publications

Cross-Problem Parameter Transferability in Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm: A Machine Learning Approach

Kien X. Nguyen, Bao Bach, and Ilya Safro. "Cross-Problem Parameter Transferability in Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm: A Machine Learning Approach." arXiv, 2025.

Beyond Accuracy: On the Effects of Fine-tuning Towards Vision-Language Model’s Prediction Rationality

Qitong Wang, Tang Li, Kien X. Nguyen and Xi Peng. "Beyond Accuracy: On the Effects of Fine-tuning Towards Vision-Language Model's Prediction Rationality." In Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2025.

Interpretable Failure Detection with Human-Level Concepts

Kien X. Nguyen, Tang Li and Xi Peng. "Interpretable Failure Detection with Human-Level Concepts." In Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2025.

SeafloorAI: A Large-scale Vision-Language Dataset for Seafloor Geological Survey

Kien X. Nguyen, Fengchun Qiao, Arthur Trembanis, and Xi Peng. "SeafloorAI: A Large-scale Vision-Language Dataset for Seafloor Geological Survey." In Proceedings of the Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, 2024.

Adaptive Cascading Network for Continual Test-time Adaptation

Kien X. Nguyen Fengchun Qiao and Xi Peng. "Adaptive Cascading Network for Continual Test-time Adaptation." In the 33rd ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, 2024.

Deep Learning-based Estimation of Whole-body Kinematics from Multi-view Images

Kien X. Nguyen, Liying Zheng, Ashley L. Hawke, Robert E. Carey, Scott P. Breloff, Kang Li, and Xi Peng. "Deep Learning-based Estimation of Whole-body Kinematics from Multi-view Images; In Computer Vision and Image Understanding, Volume 235, October 2023.

CoConv: Learning Dynamic Cooperative Convolution for Image Recognition

Kien X. Nguyen, Tiffany Ryu, Jocelyn Zhang, Xu Ma, Qing Yang, Song Fu, Paparao Palacharla, Nannan Wang, and Xi Wang. "CoConv: Learning Dynamic Cooperative Convolution for Image Recognition." In IEEE International Conference on Multimedia & Expo, 2021.

Paradox of AlphaZero: Strategic vs. Optimal Plays

Ze-Li Dou, Liran Ma, Khiem Nguyen, and Kien X. Nguyen. "Paradox of AlphaZero: Strategic vs. Optimal Plays." In The 39th IEEE International Performance Computing and Communications Conference, 2020.

Teaching

Intro to Machine Learning

Intro to Programming II

Service

• Reviewers
  • BMVC’24, CIKM’24, NeurIPS’25

Leadership

• VIP @ UD (Spring 2024)
  • Lead a team of 5 undergraduates to implement an ML model for seafloor mapping
• UD ATOM Hackathon (Jul 2024)
• UD DS + AI Hackathon (Jul 2023)