Hieu Tran-Chi Nguyen
I am a Deep Learning Research Engineer volunteer at USC Information Sciences Institute (ISI), where I work with senior PhD candidate Zihao He under the guidance of Prof. Kristina Lerman. Before this, I was a Fellow Researcher at DeepUSC Research Group, working under the guidance of Dr. Iordanis Fostiropoulos.
My research interests center on improving and better evaluating Faithfulness and Factuality of Language Models, focusing on data-driven and modeling methodologies. I am currently working on the effects of Knowledge Distillation on reducing hallucinations in LLMs.
I received my Master’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Southern California. Prior to this, I receieved a Bachelor’s degree in Information Technology from International University, Vietnam National University - Ho Chi Minh City.
news
| Feb 17, 2025 | 🎉 My first ever first-author research on Hallucination mitigation via Knowledge Distillation is now available as a preprint on arXiv! |
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| Apr 10, 2024 | Runner up at ACM’s TrojanHacks 2024 with EduSummarise🧙♂️🔮 |
| Dec 02, 2022 | Best Data Science Teamwork, DataFest 2022, Center of Knowledge-Powered Interdisciplinary Data Science (CKIDS), USC |
| Apr 14, 2022 | Awarded the Vingroup Science and Technology Scholarship for Overseas Graduate Study for Vietnamese Students, enabling me to pursue the Master’s degree at USC. |
| Oct 16, 2021 | Invited talk at THE IT_VERSE: What’s up held by Google Developer Student Clubs - GDSC HCMIU, sharing insights on securing scholarships and applying to graduate programs. |
selected publications
- Smoothing Out Hallucinations: Mitigating LLM Hallucination with Smoothed Knowledge DistillationarXiv preprint arXiv:2502.11306, May 2025