Tung Nguyen

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I’m a fourth-year PhD candidate in Computer Science at UCLA, advised by Aditya Grover. I earned my Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from the Hanoi University of Science and Technology. Prior to my PhD, I spent two wonderful years at VinAI Research as an AI Resident, where I had the privilege of working under the supervision of Hung Bui and collaborating with amazing colleagues like Rui Shu and Tuan Pham.

I’m always open to collaborations, discussions, and new opportunities. Feel free to reach out if you’re interested in my research or would like to discuss potential projects.

Research: My research focuses on building large-scale foundation models to support scientific discovery, particularly in areas related to climate change, sustainability, and the physical sciences.

1. AI for Scientific Simulation. I develop machine learning models to simulate real-world phenomena such as weather and climate dynamics using large-scale scientific datasets. These models aim to be accurate, adaptable, and capable of representing uncertainty in complex systems.

2. AI for Experimental Design. I also work on using AI to solve optimization problems in scientific and engineering domains, such as molecular design and drug discovery. My goal is to build generalizable models that can perform across tasks with limited supervision, offering efficient and robust tools for real-world scientific discovery.

Recent News

Selected Publications

  1. LICO: Large language models for in-context molecular optimization
    Tung Nguyen, and Aditya Grover
    International Conference on Learning Representations, 2025
  2. NeurIPS Best Paper
    Probing the Decision Boundaries of In-context Learning in Large Language Models
    Siyan ZhaoTung Nguyen, and Aditya Grover
    Neural Information Processing Systems, 2024
    Best Paper Award, Foundation Model Interventions Workshop, NeurIPS 2024
  3. NeurIPS Best Paper
    Scaling transformer neural networks for skillful and reliable medium-range weather forecasting
    Tung Nguyen, Rohan Shah, Hritik Bansal, Troy Arcomano, Romit Maulik, Rao Kotamarthi, Ian Foster, Sandeep Madireddy, and Aditya Grover
    Neural Information Processing Systems, 2024
    Best Paper Award, Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning Workshop, ICLR 2024
  4. ExPT: Synthetic Pretraining for Few-Shot Experimental Design
    Tung Nguyen, Sudhanshu Agrawal, and Aditya Grover
    Neural Information Processing Systems, 2023
  5. ICML Best Paper
    ClimaX: A foundation model for weather and climate
    Tung NguyenJohannes BrandstetterAshish Kapoor , Jayesh K Gupta, and Aditya Grover
    International Conference on Machine Learning, 2023
    Best Paper Award, Synergy of Scientific and Machine Learning Modeling Workshop, ICML 2023
  6. Transformer Neural Processes: Uncertainty-Aware Meta Learning Via Sequence Modeling
    Tung Nguyen, and Aditya Grover
    International Conference on Machine Learning, 2022

Selected Preprints

  1. Preprint
    Predicting from Strings: Language Model Embeddings for Bayesian Optimization
    Tung Nguyen, Qiuyi Zhang, Bangding Yang, Chansoo Lee, Jorg Bornschein, Yingjie Miao, Sagi Perel, Yutian Chen, and Xingyou Song
    Under Review, 2025
This webpage was adapted from my friend's webpage at https://khainb.com/