Xin chào! I am Khoi, a doctoral student in the Human Language Technology Research Institute, University of Texas at Dallas, supervised by Professor Vincent Ng. I work on vision-language reasoning. My research explores meme processing as a structured and controlled environment to push the boundaries of machine’s vision-language perception, reasoning, and generation in real-world contexts. My work has been published in ACL, EMNLP, and more. My long term goal is to harness AI for Vietnam and for humanity.
Beside research, I enjoy building real-world systems, usually with machine learning. Some of the products I am proud of are:
- a requirement processing pipeline and a knowledge graph-based chatbot at GE Aerospace,
- an interactive map that shows roof area and potential solar energy of buildings in Vietnam at Solano Energy,
- the version control feature of dbdiagram.io, a tool at Holistics with 200K monthly active users,
- and OneSchedule – a course planning website used by many students at my undergrad university.
In my freetime, I enjoy running, meditating, and blogging.
News
- [August 2025] Paper MemeInterpret: Towards an All-in-One Dataset for Meme Understanding published at EMNLP Findings 2025 (Suzhou, China)
- [May 2025] Paper MemeQA: Holistic Evaluation for Meme Understanding accepted at ACL 2025 (Vienna, Austria)
- [May 2025] I passed my Qualification Exam at UTD, proceeding to PhD candidacy.
- [April 2025] I has been awarded the Louis Beecherl, Jr. Graduate Fellowship at UT Dallas.
- [April 2025] I will be interning at GE Aerospace Research (Niskayuna, NY) in Summer 2025.
Fun facts
- I was a competitive programmer at national and regional level (CodeForces profile, press).
- I graduated in the inaugural cohort of a brand new university called Fulbright University Vietnam. That was the best four years of my life.