Minh Nguyen

Gia H. Ngo, Minh Nguyen, Nancy F. Chen et al.

Neuroimaging studies are often limited by the number of subjects and cognitive processes that can be feasibly interrogated. However, a rapidly growing number of neuroscientific studies have collectively accumulated an extensive wealth of results. Digesting this growing literature and obtaining novel insights remains to be a major challenge, since existing meta-analytic tools are constrained to keyword queries. In this paper, we present Text2Brain, an easy to use tool for synthesizing brain activation maps from open-ended text queries. Text2Brain was built on a transformer-based neural network language model and a coordinate-based meta-analysis of neuroimaging studies. Text2Brain combines a transformer-based text encoder and a 3D image generator, and was trained on variable-length text snippets and their corresponding activation maps sampled from 13,000 published studies. In our experiments, we demonstrate that Text2Brain can synthesize meaningful neural activation patterns from various free-form textual descriptions. Text2Brain is available at https://braininterpreter.com as a web-based tool for efficiently searching through the vast neuroimaging literature and generating new hypotheses.

Minh Nguyen, Alan Q. Wang, Heejong Kim et al.

Healthcare data often come from multiple sites in which the correlations between confounding variables can vary widely. If deep learning models exploit these unstable correlations, they might fail catastrophically in unseen sites. Although many methods have been proposed to tackle unstable correlations, each has its limitations. For example, adversarial training forces models to completely ignore unstable correlations, but doing so may lead to poor predictive performance. Other methods (e.g. Invariant risk minimization [4]) try to learn domain-invariant representations that rely only on stable associations by assuming a causal data-generating process (input X causes class label Y ). Thus, they may be ineffective for anti-causal tasks (Y causes X), which are common in computer vision. We propose a method called CoPA (Conditional Prevalence-Adjustment) for anti-causal tasks. CoPA assumes that (1) generation mechanism is stable, i.e. label Y and confounding variable(s) Z generate X, and (2) the unstable conditional prevalence in each site E fully accounts for the unstable correlations between X and Y . Our crucial observation is that confounding variables are routinely recorded in healthcare settings and the prevalence can be readily estimated, for example, from a set of (Y, Z) samples (no need for corresponding samples of X). CoPA can work even if there is a single training site, a scenario which is often overlooked by existing methods. Our experiments on synthetic and real data show CoPA beating competitive baselines.

Alan Q. Wang, Minh Nguyen, Mert R. Sabuncu

Machine learning models will often fail when deployed in an environment with a data distribution that is different than the training distribution. When multiple environments are available during training, many methods exist that learn representations which are invariant across the different distributions, with the hope that these representations will be transportable to unseen domains. In this work, we present a nonparametric strategy for learning invariant representations based on the recently-proposed Nadaraya-Watson (NW) head. The NW head makes a prediction by comparing the learned representations of the query to the elements of a support set that consists of labeled data. We demonstrate that by manipulating the support set, one can encode different causal assumptions. In particular, restricting the support set to a single environment encourages the model to learn invariant features that do not depend on the environment. We present a causally-motivated setup for our modeling and training strategy and validate on three challenging real-world domain generalization tasks in computer vision.

Thi Minh Chau Nguyen, Minh Hieu Nguyen, Duc Anh Nguyen et al.

Federated sequential recommendation (FedSeqRec) aims to perform next-item prediction while keeping user data decentralised, yet model quality is frequently constrained by fragmented, noisy, and homogeneous interaction logs stored on individual devices. Many existing approaches attempt to compensate through manual data augmentation or additional server-side constraints, but these strategies either introduce limited semantic diversity or increase system overhead. To overcome these challenges, we propose \textbf{LUMOS}, a parameter-isolated FedSeqRec architecture that integrates large language models (LLMs) as \emph{local semantic generators}. Instead of sharing gradients or auxiliary parameters, LUMOS privately invokes an on-device LLM to construct three complementary sequence variants from each user history: (i) \emph{future-oriented} trajectories that infer plausible behavioural continuations, (ii) \emph{semantically equivalent rephrasings} that retain user intent while diversifying interaction patterns, and (iii) \emph{preference-inconsistent counterfactuals} that serve as informative negatives. These synthesized sequences are jointly encoded within the federated backbone through a tri-view contrastive optimisation scheme, enabling richer representation learning without exposing sensitive information. Experimental results across three public benchmarks show that LUMOS achieves consistent gains over competitive centralised and federated baselines on HR@20 and NDCG@20. In addition, the use of semantically grounded positive signals and counterfactual negatives improves robustness under noisy and adversarial environments, even without dedicated server-side protection modules. Overall, this work demonstrates the potential of LLM-driven semantic generation as a new paradigm for advancing privacy-preserving federated recommendation.

Minh Hieu Nguyen, Hien Thu Pham, Hiep Minh Ha et al.

In today's fast-evolving business landscape, having insight into the technology stacks that organizations use is crucial for forging partnerships, uncovering market openings, and informing strategic choices. However, conventional technology mapping, which typically hinges on keyword searches, struggles with the sheer scale and variety of data available, often failing to capture nascent technologies. To overcome these hurdles, we present STARS (Semantic Technology and Retrieval System), a novel framework that harnesses Large Language Models (LLMs) and Sentence-BERT to pinpoint relevant technologies within unstructured content, build comprehensive company profiles, and rank each firm's technologies according to their operational importance. By integrating entity extraction with Chain-of-Thought prompting and employing semantic ranking, STARS provides a precise method for mapping corporate technology portfolios. Experimental results show that STARS markedly boosts retrieval accuracy, offering a versatile and high-performance solution for cross-industry technology mapping.

Gia H. Ngo, Minh Nguyen, Nancy F. Chen et al.

Most neuroimaging experiments are under-powered, limited by the number of subjects and cognitive processes that an individual study can investigate. Nonetheless, over decades of research, neuroscience has accumulated an extensive wealth of results. It remains a challenge to digest this growing knowledge base and obtain new insights since existing meta-analytic tools are limited to keyword queries. In this work, we propose Text2Brain, a neural network approach for coordinate-based meta-analysis of neuroimaging studies to synthesize brain activation maps from open-ended text queries. Combining a transformer-based text encoder and a 3D image generator, Text2Brain was trained on variable-length text snippets and their corresponding activation maps sampled from 13,000 published neuroimaging studies. We demonstrate that Text2Brain can synthesize anatomically-plausible neural activation patterns from free-form textual descriptions of cognitive concepts. Text2Brain is available at https://braininterpreter.com as a web-based tool for retrieving established priors and generating new hypotheses for neuroscience research.

Minh Nguyen, Gia H. Ngo, Nancy F. Chen

Logographs (Chinese characters) have recursive structures (i.e. hierarchies of sub-units in logographs) that contain phonological and semantic information, as developmental psychology literature suggests that native speakers leverage on the structures to learn how to read. Exploiting these structures could potentially lead to better embeddings that can benefit many downstream tasks. We propose building hierarchical logograph (character) embeddings from logograph recursive structures using treeLSTM, a recursive neural network. Using recursive neural network imposes a prior on the mapping from logographs to embeddings since the network must read in the sub-units in logographs according to the order specified by the recursive structures. Based on human behavior in language learning and reading, we hypothesize that modeling logographs' structures using recursive neural network should be beneficial. To verify this claim, we consider two tasks (1) predicting logographs' Cantonese pronunciation from logographic structures and (2) language modeling. Empirical results show that the proposed hierarchical embeddings outperform baseline approaches. Diagnostic analysis suggests that hierarchical embeddings constructed using treeLSTM is less sensitive to distractors, thus is more robust, especially on complex logographs.

Minh Nguyen, Gia H. Ngo, Nancy F. Chen

Graphemes of most languages encode pronunciation, though some are more explicit than others. Languages like Spanish have a straightforward mapping between its graphemes and phonemes, while this mapping is more convoluted for languages like English. Spoken languages such as Cantonese present even more challenges in pronunciation modeling: (1) they do not have a standard written form, (2) the closest graphemic origins are logographic Han characters, of which only a subset of these logographic characters implicitly encodes pronunciation. In this work, we propose a multimodal approach to predict the pronunciation of Cantonese logographic characters, using neural networks with a geometric representation of logographs and pronunciation of cognates in historically related languages. The proposed framework improves performance by 18.1% and 25.0% respective to unimodal and multimodal baselines.