Tin (Kevin) Nguyen
I am a PhD student in Computer Science at
Auburn University, working with
Prof. Anh Totti Nguyen and Prof. Chirag Agarwal at UVA. I work on Explainable AI, and Human-AI Interaction. I am particularly interested in improving human-AI workflows, and measuring frontier AI performance.
Publications my favorites () | patents () | others ()
Arxiv, 2026
PageGuide is a browser extension that acts as an in-page navigation agent: given a user's question, it locates the supporting evidence on the current webpage (DOM or non-DOM elements) and highlights exactly where the answer comes from, instead of leaving the user to skim the whole page.
TMLR, 2026
Also accepted at NeurIPS 2025 Workshop Multimodal Algorithmic Reasoning (MAR) —
Oral
Highlighted Chain of Thought (HoT) outputs XML-style evidence tags in each reasoning step, linking conclusions to specific input spans so users can trace why an answer is produced.
NAACL, 2024
PEEB is a part-based, interpretable-by-design image classifier that predicts an object's class by first describing its visible parts in natural language (e.g., wing color, beak shape) and matching those descriptions against a text-conditioned part detector. As a result, users can inspect exactly which part attributes drove a prediction and edit the class descriptions to correct or adapt the model without retraining.
Knowledge-based Systems (KBS), Jul 4, 2023
This work studies vision-and-language navigation in 3D environments built on VizDoom, where an agent must follow a natural-language instruction to reach a target location.
ICML, 2026
I contributed two tasks evaluating object counting and physical reasoning capabilities of video-language models.
International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications (IJACSA), Vol. 11, No. 4, 2020
Korean Patent No. 10-2979119 — Registered Jun 2026
Expert Systems with Applications, 2023
Teaching
- Teaching Assistant for Formal Languages, Machine Learning, and Security at Auburn University
- Teaching Robotics for kids at K-6 AI Club at Auburn University
Mentoring
- Truong Thoi Thang, CS PhD student at Auburn University, 2026-Now
Academic Service
- Area Chair for Interpreting Agent Behavior (IAB) Workshop (NeurIPS 2026)
- Program Committee (PC) for IUI 27 (Intelligent User Interfaces)
- Reviewer for ML Conferences: ARR Rolling Review (ACL, EMNLP, NAACL), Workshop on Evaluation of Interactive Agents (NeurIPS 2026), Interpreting Agent Behavior (IAB) Workshop (NeurIPS 2026)
- Reviewer for HCI Conferences: UIST, HAI, IUI
- Reviewer for Journals: Knowledge-based Systems
Education
Auburn University
Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering
Advisor: Anh (Totti) Nguyen
Research: Explainable AI and Human-AI Interaction
Teaching Assistant: Formal Languages, Machine Learning, Secure Software Process
Sejong University
M.Sc. in Computer Science and Engineering
Advisor: Kim Yong-Guk
Research: Robot Navigation
University of Science
B.A. in Computer Science and Engineering
Advisor: Ngoc Quoc Ly
Research: Computer Vision and Robotics
Work Experience
Aikyam Lab, University of Virginia
Research Intern
Advisor: Chirag Agarwal
- Developed a multimodal web agent that browses websites and captures evidence (text, images, charts) at every navigation step
- Developed a defense against model distillation attacks, in which an adversary copies a proprietary model by training on its outputs
AIOZ Co., Ltd.
AI Engineer
- Built three video-analysis systems: automatically reading car license plates, tracking a moving ball, and recognizing the same person across different cameras
Gumi Co., Ltd.
AI Engineer Intern
- Built an optical character recognition (OCR) model for handwritten Japanese text in scanned bills and documents
Gameloft
Game Programmer Intern
- Built an arcade game using Cocos2d-x (C++)
Honors & Awards
Tinker Research Grant
Tinker · Awarded $5,000 for compute/API credits
Korean Patent Registration ★ Patent
Ministry of Intellectual Property, Republic of Korea · Patent No. 10-2979119, Coarse-to-Fine Fusion Method and Apparatus for Language-Command-Based Virtual Space Navigation
GSC Travel Fellowship
Auburn University Graduate School Council · Awarded $400 to support conference travel
Tinker Promotion
Tinker · Awarded $150 in credits
1st Prize, AICovidVN Challenge
Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam · Introduced Fruit-CoV, a framework detecting SARS-CoV-2 through cough sounds (~$4,300 prize)
Skills
Programming Languages
AI & ML
Frameworks & Libraries
Robotics
Databases & Vector Stores
Infrastructure & DevOps
Developer Tools
Projects
Statistics in HCI
A collection of references and notes on the statistical methods commonly used in HCI research.
Human-Robot Interaction
Course materials and notes on the algorithmic foundations of human-robot interaction.
JdeRobot Robotics Academy
A collection of hands-on robotics exercises (perception, navigation, driving, drones) built on ROS/Gazebo.