Hieu Trung Nguyen
Portrait of Hieu Trung Nguyen

Academic profile

Hieu Trung Nguyen

SEEM PhD Student @ CUHK

Reasoning optimization for Transformer-based Language Models.

Affiliation
Chinese University of Hong Kong
Location
Hong Kong

01 · Profile

About me

I am 2nd year PhD student at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), advised by Prof. Viet Anh Nguyen. Prior to my PhD, I spent 2 wonderful years at VinAI Research as a Research Resident.

While I have broad experience in recommender systems, graph neural networks, and continual learning, my current research focuses on reasoning optimization for Transformer-based Language Models. I work to improve LLM reasoning performance, diversity, and efficiency using techniques like LLM Post-Training (GRPO, self-distillation), KV Cache Compression, model pruning, and routing.

Please feel free to reach out via email (hilljun.2000@gmail.com) or WeChat (ID: junhill9961).

02 · Research

Publications

2026

  1. Adaptive Rollout Allocation for Online Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards

    Hieu Trung Nguyen, Bao Nguyen, Wenao Ma, Yuzhi Zhao, Ruifeng She and Viet Anh Nguyen

    ICLR · 2026

2025

  1. Reasoning Planning for Language Models

    Bao Nguyen, Hieu Trung Nguyen, Ruifeng She, Xiaojin Fu and Viet Anh Nguyen

    NeurIPS · 2025Spotlight

  2. Mixture-of-Personas Language Models for Population Simulation

    Ngoc Bui, Hieu Trung Nguyen, Shantanu Kumar, Julian Theodore, Weikang Qiu, Viet Anh Nguyen and Rex Ying

    ACL · 2025Findings

  3. Structured Pruning for Diverse Best-of-N Reasoning Optimization

    Hieu Trung Nguyen, Bao Nguyen and Viet Anh Nguyen

    ACL · 2025Findings

  4. Task-driven Layerwise Additive Activation Intervention

    Hieu Trung Nguyen, Bao Nguyen, Binh Nguyen and Viet Anh Nguyen

    NAACL · 2025Main

2024

  1. Cold-start Recommendation by Personalized Embedding Region Elicitation

    Hieu Trung Nguyen, Duy Nguyen, Khoa Doan and Viet Anh Nguyen

    UAI · 2024

  2. Explaining Graph Neural Networks via Structure-aware Interaction Index

    Ngoc Bui, Hieu Trung Nguyen, Viet Anh Nguyen and Rex Ying

    ICML · 2024

  3. Generative Conditional Distributions by Neural (Entropic) Optimal Transport

    Bao Nguyen, Binh Nguyen, Hieu Trung Nguyen and Viet Anh Nguyen

    ICML · 2024

2022

  1. Combining Soft-Actor Critic with Cross-Entropy Method for Policy Search in Continuous Control

    Hieu Trung Nguyen, Khang Tran and Ngoc Hoang Luong

    IEEE CEC · 2022Oral

Journals

  1. Retrospective Feature Estimation for Continual Learning

    Nghia D. Nguyen, Hieu Trung Nguyen, Ang Li, Hoang Pham, Viet Anh Nguyen and Khoa D. Doan

    Transactions on Machine Learning ResearchFeatured Certification, J2C Certification

03 · Community

Academic Services

  • ICML 20262025
  • ICLR 20262025
  • WWW 2025
  • NeurIPS 2024

04 · Recognition

Honors and Awards

  • 2026: ICML 2026 Golden Reviewer.
  • July 2024: ICLR2026 Travel Grant! (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)
  • July 2024: ICML2024 Travel Grant! (Vienna, Austria)
  • April 2022: Bachelors Thesis with highest score.
  • September 2018 - April 2022: Honor Student Scholarship for all Academic Years - UIT