Research funding

Funded Projects

Advancing Humanoid Robot Learning through Perception Modeling, World Models, and Biomimetic Machine Intelligence

2026 - 2029

Principal Investigator · funded by Center for AI Research, VinUniversity

Brain-inspired predictive perception and world models that let humanoid robots imagine outcomes before acting, improving robustness in long-horizon tasks under uncertainty and enabling human-aware safety protocols — foundations for safer, more versatile, and more trustworthy humanoid robotics.

VinUni–NTU Joint Research Center on Embodied AI and Robotics

2026 - present

Co-lead of the VinUni team, with Prof. Nguyen Xuan Hung · NTU lead: Prof. Lihua Xie

Joint research programme spanning robot foundation models, embodied AI, and human–robot collaboration, involving more than seven VinUni faculty, with shared compute infrastructure and jointly supervised PhD students.

Scalable Robot Learning from Crowdsourced Teleoperaton Data

2026 - 2028

Principal Investigator · funded by Inverted Lambda

Building large-scale, diverse robot demonstration datasets by crowdsourcing teleoperation from distributed, non-expert operators — dramatically lowering the cost of robot data collection compared with in-lab expert demonstrations. The project develops quality-assessment and filtering methods for noisy, heterogeneous crowd data, and imitation-learning and finetuning pipelines that turn it into robust manipulation policies and training corpora for robot foundation models.

V-IndoorCARE: An advanced AI-enabled environmental simulation and HVAC control system for greener and healthier multi-user indoor facilities in Vietnam

2025-2027

PI, VinGroup Innovation Fund

Robust Vietnamese-English Clinical and Educational Medical Translation

2024-2026

PI, VinUni Cross-College Fund

SMART-CEM: Applying Artificial Intelligence (AI) and eye-tracking in designing and managing delightful customer experiences in the hospitality sector

2023-2025

co-PI, VinGroup Innovation Fund - VINIF

Smart Indoor Air Quality Control System for Healthier and Greener Buildings

2022-2026

PI, VinUni-Illinois Smart Health

Language Processing Adaptations for Multiple Recommendation Tasks

2023-2025

PI, VinUni Seed Grant

Multimodal Federated Learning for Multi-objectives Recommendation

2022-2024

PI, VinUni Fast Track Grant

Selected work

Publications

Journal Papers 10

  • 2026

    Probing Spatial Robustness in OCR-Dependent Document Understanding: Adversarial Attacks on Bounding Box Metadata Across Layout-Aware Architectures

    Dong Nguyen Tien, Dung D. Le, Dang Nguyen Hoang, Hoang Vu Viet, Vinh Nguyen Thanh, Minh Nguyen Anh

    Machine Learning, 2026

  • 2026

    A Framework for Controllable Multi-objective Learning with Annealed Stein Variational Hypernetworks

    Minh-Duc Nguyen, Dung. D Le

    ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology, 2026

  • 2026

    KALM4Rec: Keyword-driven Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models for Cold-start User Recommendations

    Hai Dang Kieu, Minh Duc Nguyen, Wray Buntine,Thanh-Son Nguyen, Dung. D Le

    Machine Learning, 2026

  • 2026

    Enhancing Graph-based Recommendations with Majority-Voting LLM-Rerank Augmentation

    Minh-Anh Nguyen, Bao Nguyen, Ha Lan N.T., Tuan Anh Hoang, Duc-Trong Le, Dung D. Le

    Machine Learning, 2026

  • 2026

    Algorithmic Iterative Reticular Synthesis of Zeolitic Imidazolate Framework Crystals

    Zichao Rong, Zihao Chen, Felix Luong, Saumil Chheda, H. T. Nhan Luong, Zhiling Zheng, Kevin Greco, Abdullah A. Alghamdi, K. Huyen Bui, Theo Jaffrelot Inizan, Tung Nguyen-Dang, H. Hieu Pham, Dung D. Le, Joachim Sauer, Viet Bac T. Phung, Jennifer T. Chayes, Christian Borgs, Mario Boley, Laurent El Ghaoui, Omar M. Yaghi

    Nature Synthesis, 2026

  • 2025

    Finding Environmental-friendly Chemical Synthesis with AI and High-throughput Robotics

    Vu Van Hao, Bui Khanh Huyen, Dang Dinh Dang Khoa, Duong Tuan Manh, Dung D. Le, Tung Nguyen-Dang

    Journal of Science: Advanced Materials and Devices, 2025

  • 2024

    Towards Efficient Pareto-optimal Utility-Fairness between Groups in Repeated Rankings

    Phuong Dinh Mai, Duc-Trong Le, Tuan-Anh Hoang, Dung D. Le

    Machine Learning Journal, ACML 2024 Special Issue

  • 2024

    A Framework for Controllable Pareto Front Learning with Completed Scalarization Functions and its Applications

    Tran Anh Tuan, Long P. Hoang, Dung D. Le, Tran Ngoc Thang

    Neural Networks Journal, Jan 2024

  • 2023

    Enhancing Few-shot Image Classification with Cosine Transformer

    Quang-Huy Nguyen, Cuong Q. Nguyen, Dung D. Le, and Hieu H. Pham

    IEEE Access, 2023

  • 2021

    Efficient Retrieval of Matrix Factorization-based Top-k Recommendations: A Survey of Recent Approaches

    Dung D. Le and Hady W. Lauw

    Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR), 2021

Conference Papers 31

  • 2026

    En-ViMedNER: An English-Vietnamese Parallel Biomedical Corpus with UMLS Semantic Type Annotations

    Nhu Vo, Phuong Nguyen, Nu Uyen Phuong Le, Iñigo Jauregi Unanue, Dung D. Le, Massimo Piccardi, Wray Buntine

    EMNLP 2026 Findings

  • 2026

    The Confidence Trap: Calibration Attacks for Graph Neural Networks

    Dang Cao Cuong, Jiahao Zhang, HIEU TA QUANG, Dung D. Le, Lu Cheng, Suhang Wang

    SIGKDD 2026 - Research Track

  • 2026

    Memory-efficient Continual Learning with Prototypical Exemplar Condensation

    Duong Minh Nguyen, Thien-Thanh Dao, Le-Tuan Nguyen, Dung D. Le, Kok-Seng Wong

    Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2026 (CVPR 2026 Findings)

  • 2026

    Computation and Communication Efficient Federated Unlearning via On-server Gradient Conflict Mitigation and Expression

    Minh-Duong Nguyen, Senura Hansaja Wanasekara, Le-Tuan Nguyen, Ken-Tye Yong, Quoc-Viet Pham, Nguyen H. Tran, Dung D. Le

    Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2026 (CVPR 2026)

  • 2026

    ViMedCSS: A Vietnamese Medical Code-Switching Speech Dataset & Benchmark

    Tung X. Nguyen, Nhu Vo, Giang Son Nguyen, Duy Mai Hoang, Chien Dinh Huynh, Iñigo Jauregi Unanue, Massimo Piccardi, Wray Buntine, Dung D. Le

    The Fifteenth biennial Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC 2026)

  • 2026

    CLIP-FMoE: Scalable CLIP via Fused Mixture-of-Experts with Enforced Specialization

    Luong Tran, Lan-Cuong Nguyen, Huynh Dang Nguyen, Dat Nguyen Cong, Dung D. Le, Van Nguyen

    The Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2026)

  • 2026

    PromptHG: Prompt-Enhanced Heterogeneous Graph for Personalized News Recommendation

    Dang Kieu, Delvin Ce Zhang, Minh-Duc Nguyen, Qiang Wu, Min Xu, Dung D. Le

    The 48th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2026)

  • 2026

    Detecting Out-of-Distribution Objects through Class-Conditioned Inpainting

    Quang-Huy Nguyen, Jin Zhou, Zhenzhen Liu, Huyen Bui, Kilian Q. Weinberger, Wei-Lun Chao, Dung D. Le

    The IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision 2026 (WACV 2026)

  • 2025

    JEPA4REC: Learning Effective Language Representations for Sequential Recommendation via Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture

    Minh-Anh Nguyen, Dung D. Le

    The 2nd Conference on Language Modeling (COLM 2025)

  • 2025

    Designing Search Space for Unbounded Bayesian Optimization via Transfer Learning

    Quoc-Anh Hoang Nguyen, The Hung Tran, Sunil Gupta, Dung D. Le

    The 2025 European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice on Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECMLPKDD 2025)

  • 2025

    Provably Improving Generalization of Few-shot models with Synthetic Data

    Lan-Cuong Nguyen, Quan Nguyen-Tri, Bang Tran Khanh, Dung D. Le, Long Tran-Thanh, Khoat Than

    The 42th International Conference in Machine Learning (ICML 2025)

  • 2025

    Enhancing News Recommendation with Hierarchical LLM Prompting

    Dang Hai Kieu, Delvin Ce Zhang, Minh Duc Nguyen, Min Xum Qiang Wu, Dung D. Le

    WWW '25: Companion Proceedings of the ACM on Web Conference 2025

  • 2025

    Keyword-driven Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models for Cold-start User Recommendations

    Dang Hai Kieu, Minh Duc Nguyen, Thanh-Son Nguyen, Dung D. Le

    WWW '25: Companion Proceedings of the ACM on Web Conference 2025

  • 2025

    VisualCoder: Guiding Large Language Models in Code Execution with Fine-grained Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

    Cuong Le Chi, Chau Truong Vinh Hoang, Phan Nhật Huy, Dung D. Le, Tien N Nguyen, Nghi D. Q. Bui

    The 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the ACL (NAACL 2025)

  • 2025

    Improving Pareto Set Learning for Expensive Multi-Objective Optimization via Stein Variational Hypernetworks

    Minh Duc Nguyen, Phuong Mai Dinh, Quang-Huy Nguyen, Hoang Phi Long, Dung D. Le

    The 39th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2025)

  • 2024

    Experience as Source for Anticipation and Planning: Experiential Policy Learning for Target-driven Recommendation Dialogues

    Huy Quang Dao, Yang Deng, Khanh-Huyen Bui, Dung D. Le, Lizi Liao

    Findings of EMNLP 2024

  • 2024

    A Curious Case of Searching for the Correlation between Training Data and Adversarial Robustness of Transformer Textual Models

    Dang Cao Cuong, Dung D. Le, Thai Le

    Findings of ACL, 2024

  • 2024

    Broadening the View: Demonstration-augmented Prompt Learning for Conversational Recommendation

    Huy Dao, Yang Deng, Dung D. Le, Lizi Liao

    The 47th ACM SIGIR on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2024)

  • 2024

    Improving Vietnamese-English Medical Machine Translation

    Nhu Vo, Dat Quoc Nguyen, Dung D. Le, Massimo Piccardi and Wray Buntine

    The 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)

  • 2024

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

    Ngoc-Hieu Nguyen, Tuan-Anh Nguyen, Tuan Minh Nguyen, Vu Tien Hoang, Dung D. Le, Kok-Seng Wong

    The 2024 ACM Web Conference

  • 2023

    Reinforced Target-driven Conversational Promotion

    Huy Quang Dao, Lizi Liao, Dung D. Le, Yuxiang Nie

    The 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2023)

  • 2023

    Towards Data-Agnostic Pruning At Initialization: What Makes a Good Sparse Mask?

    Hoang Pham, The-Anh Ta, Shiwei Liu, Lichuan Xiang, Dung D. Le. Hongkai Wen, Long Tran-Thanh

    The 2023 Conference on Neural Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2023)

  • 2023

    A Probabilistic Framework for Pruning Transformers via a Finite Admixture of Keys

    T. Nguyen, T. Nguyen, Long Bui, Hai Do, Dung D. Le, Hung Tran-The, Duy Khuong Nguyen, N. Ho, S. J. Osher, R. G. Baraniuk

    The 2023 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2023)

  • Improving Pareto Front Learning via Multi-Sample Hypernetworks

    Hoang Phi Long, Dung D. Le, Tran Anh Tuan, Tran Ngoc Thang

    AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-23)

  • 2022

    Improving Transformers with Probabilistic Attention Keys

    T. Nguyen, T. Nguyen, Dung D. Le, K. Nguyen, A. Tran, R. G. Baraniuk, N. Ho, S. J. Osher

    The Thirty-ninth International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2022), July 2022

  • 2022

    Collaborative Curating for Discovery and Expansion of Visual Clusters

    Dung D. Le and Hady W. Lauw

    The 15th ACM International Conference in Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM-22), Feb 2022

  • 2020

    Stochastically Robust Personalized Ranking for LSH Recommendation Retrieval

    Dung D. Le and Hady W. Lauw

    AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-20), Feb 2020

  • 2019

    Learning Multiple Maps from Conditional Ordinal Triplets

    Dung D. Le and Hady W. Lauw

    International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI'19), Aug 2019

  • 2018

    Multiperspective Graph-Theoretic Similarity Measure

    Dung D. Le and Hady W. Lauw

    ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM'18), Oct 2018

  • 2017

    Indexable Bayesian Personalized Ranking for Efficient Top-k Recommendation

    Dung D. Le and Hady W. Lauw

    ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM'17), Nov 2017

  • 2016

    Euclidean Co-Embedding of Ordinal Data for Multi-Type Visualization

    Dung D. Le and Hady W. Lauw

    SIAM International Conference on Data Mining (SDM'16), May 2016

Tutorials 1

  • 2019

    Recent Advances on Scalable Retrieval of Personalized Recommendation

    Dung D. Le and Hady W. Lauw

    The Thirty-Third AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-19), Jan 2019

PhD Thesis 1

  • Preference Learning and Similarity Learning Perspectives on Personalized Recommendation

    Duy Dung LE, Singapore Management University

Open source

Projects

Besides conducting intensive research, I also develop research frameworks and libraries, and supervise undergraduate capstone projects.

Cerebro

Closed-loop Engine for REcommendations with Blazingly fast Retrieval of Objects

Thriftcity

Personalized Recommendation System for ThriftCity - A Price Comparison Website

Courses

Teaching Experience

VinUniversity

  • COMP4050/COMP5090 Cryptography Spring 2024
  • COMP4010/COMP5120 Data Visualization Spring 2024
  • BANA4020 Computational Machine Learning for Business Analytics Spring 2024
  • MATH4010 Advanced Probability and Statistics Spring 2022, Spring 2023
  • CISM2010 Database Concepts and Skills for Big Data Spring 2022, Fall 2023
  • CECS1030 Algorithmic and Computational Thinking Spring 2022
  • MATH2010 Probability and Statistics Fall 2021, Fall 2022
  • COMP2030 Software Construction Fall 2022, Fall 2023

Graduate Instructor (SMU)

  • COR-IS1702: Computational Thinking (AY2019-2020)

Teaching Assistant (SMU)

  • IS103: Computational Thinking (AY2017-2018)
  • IS302: Information Security and Trust (AY2017-2018)
Invited

Talks

  • Representation Learning for Efficient Recommendation Retrieval

    Hanoi University of Science and Technology, School of Information and Communication Technology

  • MP-SimRank: Multiperspective Graph-theoretic Similarity Measure

    PreferredAI TechFest 2019

  • Your Personalized Digital World

    Singapore Management University 3-Minute-Thesis 2019

  • Dealing with L'Embarras Du Choix Choice Paralysis when Shopping Online

    Singapore Management University 3-Minute-Thesis 2017

Recognition

Awards

  • VinUniversity Leader of the Year Award for Academic Year 2024-2025
  • 2025 Vietnam Golden Globe Science and Technology Award
  • VinUniversity Faculty with Outstanding Contribution Award for Academic Year 2022-2023
  • VinUniversity Teaching Innovation Grant for Academic Year 2023-2024
  • VinUniversity Faculty of the Year Award for Academic Year 2021-2022
  • VinUniversity Teaching Excellent Award for Academic Year 2021-2022
  • Winner of SMU Presidential Doctorial Fellowship (2018, 2019)
  • Recipient of SMU PhD Student Life Award (2018, 2019)
  • Conference Travel Awards: AAAI 2020, AAAI 2019, IJCAI 2019, CIKM 2018, CIKM 2017, SDM 2016
  • Postgraduate scholarship, Singapore Management University ( Aug 2015 )
  • Honoured as the valedictorian of School of Applied Mathematics and Informatics, Hanoi University of Science and Technology (Sep 2014)
  • Scholarships of Vietnam National Program for the Development of Mathematics AY13-14, AY12-13
  • Lawrence S.Ting scholarship for excellent student AY2011-12
  • National Mathematics Competition for University Students (first prize - 2010, second prize - 2011)
  • Third prize, Vietnam Mathematics Olympiad (Mar 2009 – high school level)