Nam V. Nguyen

S. Karthik Mukkavilli, Daniel Salles Civitarese, Johannes Schmude et al.

Machine learning and deep learning methods have been widely explored in understanding the chaotic behavior of the atmosphere and furthering weather forecasting. There has been increasing interest from technology companies, government institutions, and meteorological agencies in building digital twins of the Earth. Recent approaches using transformers, physics-informed machine learning, and graph neural networks have demonstrated state-of-the-art performance on relatively narrow spatiotemporal scales and specific tasks. With the recent success of generative artificial intelligence (AI) using pre-trained transformers for language modeling and vision with prompt engineering and fine-tuning, we are now moving towards generalizable AI. In particular, we are witnessing the rise of AI foundation models that can perform competitively on multiple domain-specific downstream tasks. Despite this progress, we are still in the nascent stages of a generalizable AI model for global Earth system models, regional climate models, and mesoscale weather models. Here, we review current state-of-the-art AI approaches, primarily from transformer and operator learning literature in the context of meteorology. We provide our perspective on criteria for success towards a family of foundation models for nowcasting and forecasting weather and climate predictions. We also discuss how such models can perform competitively on downstream tasks such as downscaling (super-resolution), identifying conditions conducive to the occurrence of wildfires, and predicting consequential meteorological phenomena across various spatiotemporal scales such as hurricanes and atmospheric rivers. In particular, we examine current AI methodologies and contend they have matured enough to design and implement a weather foundation model.

Nam V. Nguyen, Huy Nguyen, Quang Pham et al.

Sparse mixture of experts (SMoE) offers an appealing solution to scale up the model complexity beyond the mean of increasing the network's depth or width. However, we argue that effective SMoE training remains challenging because of the suboptimal routing process where experts that perform computation do not directly contribute to the routing process. In this work, we propose competition, a novel mechanism to route tokens to experts with the highest neural response. Theoretically, we show that the competition mechanism enjoys a better sample efficiency than the traditional softmax routing. Furthermore, we develop CompeteSMoE, a simple yet effective algorithm to train large language models by deploying a router to learn the competition policy, thus enjoying strong performances at a low training overhead. Our extensive empirical evaluations on both the visual instruction tuning and language pre-training tasks demonstrate the efficacy, robustness, and scalability of CompeteSMoE compared to state-of-the-art SMoE strategies. We have made the implementation available at: https://github.com/Fsoft-AIC/CompeteSMoE. This work is an improved version of the previous study at arXiv:2402.02526

Nam Nguyen

Biomarker discovery is a challenging task due to the massive search space. Quantum computing and quantum Artificial Intelligence (quantum AI) can be used to address the computational problem of biomarker discovery tasks. We propose a Quantum Neural Networks (QNNs) architecture to discover biomarkers for input activation pathways. The Maximum Relevance, Minimum Redundancy (mRMR) criteria is used to score biomarker candidate sets. Our proposed model is economical since the neural solution can be delivered on constrained hardware. We demonstrate the proof of concept on four activation pathways associated with CTLA4, including (1) CTLA4-activation stand-alone, (2) CTLA4-CD8A-CD8B co-activation, (3) CTLA4-CD2 co-activation, and (4) CTLA4-CD2-CD48-CD53-CD58-CD84 co-activation. The model indicates new biomarkers associated with the mutational activation of CLTA4-associated pathways, including 20 genes: CLIC4, CPE, ETS2, FAM107A, GPR116, HYOU1, LCN2, MACF1, MT1G, NAPA, NDUFS5, PAK1, PFN1, PGAP3, PPM1G, PSMD8, RNF213, SLC25A3, UBA1, and WLS. We open source the implementation at: https://github.com/namnguyen0510/Biomarker-Discovery-with-Quantum-Neural-Networks.

Phuong-Nam Nguyen

We introduce a novel mathematical framework that unifies neural population dynamics, hippocampal sharp wave-ripple (SpWR) generation, and cognitive consistency constraints inspired by Heider's theory. Our model leverages low-dimensional manifold representations to capture structured neural drift and incorporates a balance energy function to enforce coherent synaptic interactions, effectively simulating the memory consolidation processes observed in biological systems. Simulation results demonstrate that our approach not only reproduces key features of SpWR events but also enhances network interpretability. This work paves the way for scalable neuromorphic architectures that bridge neuroscience and artificial intelligence, offering more robust and adaptive learning mechanisms for future intelligent systems.

Phuong-Nam Nguyen, Quang Nguyen-The, An Vu-Minh et al.

ChatGPT, an Artificial Intelligence model, has the potential to revolutionize education. However, its effectiveness in solving non-English questions remains uncertain. This study evaluates ChatGPT's robustness using 586 Korean mathematics questions. ChatGPT achieves 66.72% accuracy, correctly answering 391 out of 586 questions. We also assess its ability to rate mathematics questions based on eleven criteria and perform a topic analysis. Our findings show that ChatGPT's ratings align with educational theory and test-taker perspectives. While ChatGPT performs well in question classification, it struggles with non-English contexts, highlighting areas for improvement. Future research should address linguistic biases and enhance accuracy across diverse languages. Domain-specific optimizations and multilingual training could improve ChatGPT's role in personalized education.

Nam Nguyen, J. Morris Chang

This study proposed a novel framework for COVID-19 severity prediction, which is a combination of data-centric and model-centric approaches. First, we propose a data-centric pre-training for extremely scare data scenarios of the investigating dataset. Second, we propose two hybrid convolution-attention neural architectures that leverage the self-attention from the Transformer and the Dense Associative Memory (Modern Hopfield networks). Our proposed approach achieves significant improvement from the conventional baseline approach. The best model from our proposed approach achieves $R^2 = 0.85 \pm 0.05$ and Pearson correlation coefficient $ρ= 0.92 \pm 0.02$ in geographic extend and $R^2 = 0.72 \pm 0.09, ρ= 0.85\pm 0.06$ in opacity prediction.

Nam Nguyen, Kwang-Chen Chen

This paper introduces a novel quantum embedding search algorithm (QES, pronounced as "quest"), enabling search for optimal quantum embedding design for a specific dataset of interest. First, we establish the connection between the structures of quantum embedding and the representations of directed multi-graphs, enabling a well-defined search space. Second, we instigate the entanglement level to reduce the cardinality of the search space to a feasible size for practical implementations. Finally, we mitigate the cost of evaluating the true loss function by using surrogate models via sequential model-based optimization. We demonstrate the feasibility of our proposed approach on synthesis and Iris datasets, which empirically shows that found quantum embedding architecture by QES outperforms manual designs whereas achieving comparable performance to classical machine learning models.

Nam Nguyen, J. Morris Chang

This paper proposes a novel cell-based neural architecture search algorithm (NAS), which completely alleviates the expensive costs of data labeling inherited from supervised learning. Our algorithm capitalizes on the effectiveness of self-supervised learning for image representations, which is an increasingly crucial topic of computer vision. First, using only a small amount of unlabeled train data under contrastive self-supervised learning allow us to search on a more extensive search space, discovering better neural architectures without surging the computational resources. Second, we entirely relieve the cost for labeled data (by contrastive loss) in the search stage without compromising architectures' final performance in the evaluation phase. Finally, we tackle the inherent discrete search space of the NAS problem by sequential model-based optimization via the tree-parzen estimator (SMBO-TPE), enabling us to reduce the computational expense response surface significantly. An extensive number of experiments empirically show that our search algorithm can achieve state-of-the-art results with better efficiency in data labeling cost, searching time, and accuracy in final validation.

Di Zhuang, Nam Nguyen, Keyu Chen et al.

As the advancement of deep learning (DL), the Internet of Things and cloud computing techniques for biomedical and healthcare problems, mobile healthcare systems have received unprecedented attention. Since DL techniques usually require enormous amount of computation, most of them cannot be directly deployed on the resource-constrained mobile and IoT devices. Hence, most of the mobile healthcare systems leverage the cloud computing infrastructure, where the data collected by the mobile and IoT devices would be transmitted to the cloud computing platforms for analysis. However, in the contested environments, relying on the cloud might not be practical at all times. For instance, the satellite communication might be denied or disrupted. We propose SAIA, a Split Artificial Intelligence Architecture for mobile healthcare systems. Unlike traditional approaches for artificial intelligence (AI) which solely exploits the computational power of the cloud server, SAIA could not only relies on the cloud computing infrastructure while the wireless communication is available, but also utilizes the lightweight AI solutions that work locally on the client side, hence, it can work even when the communication is impeded. In SAIA, we propose a meta-information based decision unit, that could tune whether a sample captured by the client should be operated by the embedded AI (i.e., keeping on the client) or the networked AI (i.e., sending to the server), under different conditions. In our experimental evaluation, extensive experiments have been conducted on two popular healthcare datasets. Our results show that SAIA consistently outperforms its baselines in terms of both effectiveness and efficiency.