Hieu N. Nguyen

I’m learning to navigate through a blurred sea.

👋 Hi! I’m Hieu. My full name, written in Vietnamese order with diacritical marks, is Nguyễn Ngọc Hiếu. I’m a first-year Ph.D. Student in CS at Penn State NLP advised by Professor Rui Zhang. You can find my academic resumé here (updated in Dec 2024).

Previouly, ...

From January 2024 to August 2025, I was a Research Assistant at the MAIL Research Lab, working with Professor Khoa D. Doan.

Between June 2023 and January 2024, I served as a Research Assistant at R2Studio and SAIL, collaborating with Professors Kok-Seng Wong and Le Duy Dung.

From May 2021 to June 2023, I was an AI Resident at the FPT AI Center, under the supervision of Dr. Hoang Thanh-Tung.

I completed my B.Sc Honours degree in Computer Science at VNU-UET, advised by Dr. Hoang Thanh-Tung and Dr. Viet-Cuong Ta.

Primary research interests

I am eager to (i) understand the foundations, strengths, and limitations of data and learning algorithms and (ii) build learning systems better capable of system 2 tasks such as reasoning, planning, and creativity.

— Last Updated: Sep 01 2025 —

selected publications

For an up-to-date list of my research papers, please see my Google Scholar profile. * denotes equal contribution.

NeurIPS

Mitigating Reward Over-optimization in Direct Alignment Algorithms with Importance Sampling

Nguyen Minh Phuc, Ngoc-Hieu Nguyen, Duy Minh Ho Nguyen, and 5 more authors

In The Thirty-ninth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, 2025

Bib

@inproceedings{phuc2025mitigating,
  title = {Mitigating Reward Over-optimization in Direct Alignment Algorithms with Importance Sampling},
  author = {Phuc, Nguyen Minh and Nguyen, Ngoc-Hieu and Nguyen, Duy Minh Ho and Liu, Anji and Mai, An and Nguyen, Binh T. and Sonntag, Daniel and Doan, Khoa D},
  booktitle = {The Thirty-ninth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems},
  year = {2025},
  url = {https://openreview.net/forum?id=ltPRj2nthL}
}

ICML

LLM-SRBench: A New Benchmark for Scientific Equation Discovery with Large Language Models

Parshin Shojaee^*, Ngoc-Hieu Nguyen^*, Kazem Meidani, and 3 more authors

In Forty-second International Conference on Machine Learning, 2025

Awarded Bib

Oral presentation: 1% acceptance

@inproceedings{shojaee2025llmsrbench,
  title = {{LLM}-{SRB}ench: A New Benchmark for Scientific Equation Discovery with Large Language Models},
  author = {Shojaee, Parshin and Nguyen, Ngoc-Hieu and Meidani, Kazem and Farimani, Amir Barati and Doan, Khoa D and Reddy, Chandan K.},
  booktitle = {Forty-second International Conference on Machine Learning},
  year = {2025},
  url = {https://openreview.net/forum?id=SyQPiZJVWY},
}

ICLR

Wicked Oddities: Selectively Poisoning for Effective Clean-Label Backdoor Attacks

Nguyen Hung-Quang, Ngoc-Hieu Nguyen, The-Anh Ta, and 4 more authors

In The Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations, 2025

Bib

@inproceedings{hung-quang2025wicked,
  title = {Wicked Oddities: Selectively Poisoning for Effective Clean-Label Backdoor Attacks},
  author = {Hung-Quang, Nguyen and Nguyen, Ngoc-Hieu and Ta, The-Anh and Nguyen-Tang, Thanh and Wong, Kok-Seng and Thanh-Tung, Hoang and Doan, Khoa D},
  booktitle = {The Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations},
  year = {2025},
  url = {https://openreview.net/forum?id=1Z3C49JQVf},
}

WWW

Towards Efficient Communication and Secure Federated Recommendation System via Low-rank Training

Ngoc-Hieu Nguyen, Tuan-Anh Nguyen, Tuan Nguyen, and 3 more authors

In Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2024, Singapore, Singapore, 2024

Awarded DOI Bib

Oral presentation

@inproceedings{10.1145/3589334.3645702,
  author = {Nguyen, Ngoc-Hieu and Nguyen, Tuan-Anh and Nguyen, Tuan and Hoang, Vu Tien and Le, Dung D. and Wong, Kok-Seng},
  title = {Towards Efficient Communication and Secure Federated Recommendation System via Low-rank Training},
  year = {2024},
  isbn = {9798400701719},
  publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
  address = {New York, NY, USA},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3589334.3645702},
  doi = {10.1145/3589334.3645702},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2024},
  pages = {3940–3951},
  numpages = {12},
  keywords = {communication efficiency, federated learning, recommendation system},
  location = {Singapore, Singapore},
  series = {WWW '24},
}