Duc Minh Nguyen

Duc Minh Nguyen, Bao-Ngoc Dao, Tung M. Luu et al.

Diffusion-based Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies enable strong generalization in robotic manipulation, but remain sensitive to spurious visual correlations and noisy action generation, leading to brittle behavior under perturbations. We introduce Selected Diffusion Noise (SDN), a simple, training-free test-time method that improves both robustness and success rate by leveraging the diffusion noise space as a controllable degree of freedom. SDN dynamically samples noise vectors that are maximally separated from a reference set to mitigate reliance on spurious cues, while selecting candidates that yield more coherent action trajectories. This dual objective encourages stable behavior even under object-masked observations and reduces action jitter without modifying model parameters. We evaluate SDN on two simulation benchmarks (Google Robot, Widow-X) and two real-world robotic datasets across multiple VLA policies, including pi_0, Groot-N1.5, and Groot-N1.6. SDN consistently improves success rates by +8% in simulation and +10% in real-world settings, while producing smoother and more stable actions. Our results highlight that diffusion noise selection can serve as an effective and general mechanism for enhancing VLA policies at test time.

Hao Vo, Khoa Vo, Phu Loc Nguyen et al.

Spatiotemporal intelligence in autonomous driving (AD) requires an agent to integrate multi-view observations into a coherent scene representation, maintain object continuity across viewpoints and time, and reason about spatial relations, interactions, and future dynamics. However, existing AD vision-language benchmarks largely focus on single-view, static, ego-centric, or single-source question answering, leaving it unclear whether current Vision-Language Models (VLMs) can truly construct and reason over dynamic driving scenes. We introduce DriveSpatial, a benchmark of 15.6K human-verified QA pairs across 20 tasks from five large-scale AD datasets. DriveSpatial evaluates four abilities: Cognitive Scene Construction, Multi-view Relational Understanding, Temporal Reasoning, and Generalization. Unlike prior benchmarks, DriveSpatial is generated from a dynamic multi-relational scene graph that encodes object states, spatial relations, interactions, camera visibility, and temporal correspondences, enabling QA pairs that enforce genuine cross-view and spatiotemporal reasoning. Evaluating 15 representative VLMs reveals a substantial human-model gap: the strongest model trails humans by 28.4 points, with Cognitive Scene Construction emerging as the key bottleneck. Further diagnostics show that language-only prompting is insufficient, while explicit BEV grounding consistently improves performance. These results suggest that current VLMs lack the scene-construction ability needed for reliable spatiotemporal driving intelligence. DriveSpatial and its construction pipeline will be released to support future research.

Tien Huu Do, Duc Minh Nguyen, Evaggelia Tsiligianni et al.

Inferring air quality from a limited number of observations is an essential task for monitoring and controlling air pollution. Existing inference methods typically use low spatial resolution data collected by fixed monitoring stations and infer the concentration of air pollutants using additional types of data, e.g., meteorological and traffic information. In this work, we focus on street-level air quality inference by utilizing data collected by mobile stations. We formulate air quality inference in this setting as a graph-based matrix completion problem and propose a novel variational model based on graph convolutional autoencoders. Our model captures effectively the spatio-temporal correlation of the measurements and does not depend on the availability of additional information apart from the street-network topology. Experiments on a real air quality dataset, collected with mobile stations, shows that the proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art approaches.

Tien Huu Do, Duc Minh Nguyen, Evaggelia Tsiligianni et al.

The problem of predicting the location of users on large social networks like Twitter has emerged from real-life applications such as social unrest detection and online marketing. Twitter user geolocation is a difficult and active research topic with a vast literature. Most of the proposed methods follow either a content-based or a network-based approach. The former exploits user-generated content while the latter utilizes the connection or interaction between Twitter users. In this paper, we introduce a novel method combining the strength of both approaches. Concretely, we propose a multi-entry neural network architecture named MENET leveraging the advances in deep learning and multiview learning. The generalizability of MENET enables the integration of multiple data representations. In the context of Twitter user geolocation, we realize MENET with textual, network, and metadata features. Considering the natural distribution of Twitter users across the concerned geographical area, we subdivide the surface of the earth into multi-scale cells and train MENET with the labels of the cells. We show that our method outperforms the state of the art by a large margin on three benchmark datasets.