Khanh X. Nguyen
kxnguyen AT berkeley.edu
I am a Postdoctoral Research Fellow of the Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence (CHAI) at the University of California–Berkeley, where I am fortunate to be mentored by Prof. Stuart Russell. Previously, I was a postdoc at the Princeton NLP group working with Prof. Karthik Narasimhan. I obtained my PhD at the University of Maryland–College Park, advised by Prof. Hal Daumé III.
I create artificial agents that have the skills and incentives to assist humans. My work specifically focuses on the following topics:
- Learning from human feedback: I worked on reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) since the pre-LLM days [EMNLP’17]. Recently, I have been developing frameworks for learning via abstract, pragmatic language-based communication [ICML’21, ArXiv’23].
- Learning to ask questions: agents that can ask questions enjoy improved interpretability, safety, and utility! I have written a series of papers to disseminate this idea [EMNLP’15’, CVPR’19, EMNLP’19, ICML’22].
- Modeling human cognition: current models implement a very primitive “model of thought” [ToM@ICML’23]. To communicate effectively with humans, their cognition must be robust and human-compatible. I recently improved the cognitive capbility of instruction-generation models [ACL’23].
More facts:
- My real name is Nguyễn Xuân Khánh . My first name (Khanh) means “joy” or “happiness”. Please do not confuse it with
Khan
orKahn
:( - I was born in Việt Nam , a peaceful country (click here for inspiration to visit us).
- I am also proud to be a PTNK (Phổ Thông Năng Khiếu) alumnus.
news
Dec 20, 2022 | New paper on task-oriented cognitive capabilities. TLDR; we found and improved the deficiency in the pragmatic capability of instruction generation models. Received outstanding paper award at the ToM workshop at ICML 2023. |
---|---|
Aug 17, 2022 | I will be organizing InterNLP workshop at NeurIPS 2022. Please submit your papers if interested! |