Quantum Hypergraph Partitioning
Cameron Ibrahim, Bao G. Bach, Jad Salem, Reuben Tate, Kien X. Nguyen, Stephan Eidenbenz, and Ilya Safro. "Quantum Hypergraph Partitioning." In Proceedings of the IEEE Quantum Computing and Engineering, 2026.
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)
- 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
- Research Aide (Argonne National Laboratory, Apr 2026-Present)
- Distributed Quantum Compilation (work in progress)
- Research Intern (Fujitsu Research, Oct 2025-Mar 2026)
- Quantum Computing for Unit Commitment [arXiv’26]
- Research Intern (Fujitsu Research, Jun 2025-Aug 2025)
- Machine Learning for Qubit Routing [arXiv’26]
- 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
Graph-Conditioned Meta-Optimizer for QAOA Parameter Generation on Multiple Problem Classes
Kien X. Nguyen and Ilya Safro. "Graph-Conditioned Meta-Optimizer for QAOA Parameter Generation on Multiple Problem Classes." In Proceedings of the IEEE Quantum Computing and Engineering, 2026.
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." In Proceedings of the IEEE Quantum Computing and Engineering, 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
Service
- Reviewers
- BMVC’24, CIKM’24, ICCV’25, BMVC’25, QCE’25, NeurIPS’25, QCE’25, AAAI’26, TQE’26, TAI’26, NeurIPS’26, ECML’26
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)