Tuan Nguyen

Tuan Dung Nguyen, Yuan-Sen Ting, Ioana Ciucă et al.

Large language models excel in many human-language tasks but often falter in highly specialized domains like scholarly astronomy. To bridge this gap, we introduce AstroLLaMA, a 7-billion-parameter model fine-tuned from LLaMA-2 using over 300,000 astronomy abstracts from arXiv. Optimized for traditional causal language modeling, AstroLLaMA achieves a 30% lower perplexity than Llama-2, showing marked domain adaptation. Our model generates more insightful and scientifically relevant text completions and embedding extraction than state-of-the-arts foundation models despite having significantly fewer parameters. AstroLLaMA serves as a robust, domain-specific model with broad fine-tuning potential. Its public release aims to spur astronomy-focused research, including automatic paper summarization and conversational agent development.

Tuan Dung Nguyen, Minh Khoi Ho, Qi Chen et al.

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) achieve strong performance on visual reasoning tasks but remain highly susceptible to hallucination. Existing detection methods predominantly rely on coarse, whole-image measures of how an object token relates to the input image. This global strategy is limited: hallucinated tokens may exhibit weak but widely scattered correlations across many local regions, which aggregate into deceptively high overall relevance, thus evading the current global hallucination detectors. We begin with a simple yet critical observation: a faithful object token must be strongly grounded in a specific image region. Building on this insight, we introduce a patch-level hallucination detection framework that examines fine-grained token-level interactions across model layers. Our analysis uncovers two characteristic signatures of hallucinated tokens: (i) they yield diffuse, non-localized attention patterns, in contrast to the compact, well-focused attention seen in faithful tokens; and (ii) they fail to exhibit meaningful semantic alignment with any visual region. Guided by these findings, we develop a lightweight and interpretable detection method that leverages patch-level statistical features, combined with hidden-layer representations. Our approach achieves up to 90% accuracy in token-level hallucination detection, demonstrating the superiority of fine-grained structural analysis for detecting hallucinations.

Tuan Dung Nguyen, Duncan J. Watts, Mark E. Whiting

Commonsense intelligence in machines is often assessed by static benchmarks that compare a model's output against human-prescribed correct labels. An important, albeit implicit, assumption of these labels is that they accurately capture what any human would think, effectively treating human common sense as homogeneous. However, recent empirical work has shown that humans vary enormously in what they consider commonsensical; thus what appears self-evident to one benchmark designer may not be so to another. Here, we propose a method for evaluating common sense in artificial intelligence (AI), specifically in large language models (LLMs), that incorporates empirically observed heterogeneity among humans by measuring the correspondence between a model's judgment and that of a human population. We first find that, when treated as independent survey respondents, most LLMs remain below the human median in their individual commonsense competence. Second, when used as simulators of a hypothetical population, LLMs correlate with real humans only modestly in the extent to which they agree on the same set of statements. In both cases, smaller, open-weight models are surprisingly more competitive than larger, proprietary frontier models. Our evaluation framework, which ties commonsense intelligence to its cultural basis, contributes to the growing call for adapting AI models to human collectivities that possess different, often incompatible, social stocks of knowledge.

Tuan Nguyen, Van Nguyen, Trung Le et al.

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) aims to transfer knowledge from a labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach called class-aware optimal transport (OT), which measures the OT distance between a distribution over the source class-conditional distributions and a mixture of source and target data distribution. Our class-aware OT leverages a cost function that determines the matching extent between a given data example and a source class-conditional distribution. By optimizing this cost function, we find the optimal matching between target examples and source class-conditional distributions, effectively addressing the data and label shifts that occur between the two domains. To handle the class-aware OT efficiently, we propose an amortization solution that employs deep neural networks to formulate the transportation probabilities and the cost function. Additionally, we propose minimizing class-aware Higher-order Moment Matching (HMM) to align the corresponding class regions on the source and target domains. The class-aware HMM component offers an economical computational approach for accurately evaluating the HMM distance between the two distributions. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our proposed method significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art baselines.

Abin Shoby, Ta Duc Huy, Tuan Dung Nguyen et al.

Vision Language models (VLMs) often hallucinate non-existent objects. Detecting hallucination is analogous to detecting deception: a single final statement is insufficient, one must examine the underlying reasoning process. Yet existing detectors rely mostly on final-layer signals. Attention-based methods assume hallucinated tokens exhibit low attention, while entropy-based ones use final-step uncertainty. Our analysis reveals the opposite: hallucinated objects can exhibit peaked attention due to contextual priors; and models often express high confidence because intermediate layers have already converged to an incorrect hypothesis. We show that the key to hallucination detection lies within the model's thought process, not its final output. By probing decoder layers, we uncover a previously overlooked behavior, overthinking: models repeatedly revise object hypotheses across layers before committing to an incorrect answer. Once the model latches onto a confounded hypothesis, it can propagate through subsequent layers, ultimately causing hallucination. To capture this behavior, we introduce the Overthinking Score, a metric to measure how many competing hypotheses the model entertains and how unstable these hypotheses are across layers. This score significantly improves hallucination detection: 78.9% F1 on MSCOCO and 71.58% on AMBER.

Khanh Doan, Quyen Tran, Tung Lam Tran et al.

Mitigating catastrophic forgetting is a key hurdle in continual learning. Deep Generative Replay (GR) provides techniques focused on generating samples from prior tasks to enhance the model's memory capabilities using generative AI models ranging from Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to the more recent Diffusion Models (DMs). A major issue is the deterioration in the quality of generated data compared to the original, as the generator continuously self-learns from its outputs. This degradation can lead to the potential risk of catastrophic forgetting (CF) occurring in the classifier. To address this, we propose the Gradient Projection Class-Prototype Conditional Diffusion Model (GPPDM), a GR-based approach for continual learning that enhances image quality in generators and thus reduces the CF in classifiers. The cornerstone of GPPDM is a learnable class prototype that captures the core characteristics of images in a given class. This prototype, integrated into the diffusion model's denoising process, ensures the generation of high-quality images of the old tasks, hence reducing the risk of CF in classifiers. Moreover, to further mitigate the CF of diffusion models, we propose a gradient projection technique tailored for the cross-attention layer of diffusion models to maximally maintain and preserve the representations of old task data in the current task as close as possible to their representations when they first arrived. Our empirical studies on diverse datasets demonstrate that our proposed method significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art models, highlighting its satisfactory ability to preserve image quality and enhance the model's memory retention.