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Thao Nguyen

27 accepted papers

2026

Concept-Aware Batch Sampling Improves Language-Image Pretraining

CVPR 2026

What data should a vision-language model be trained on? To answer this question, many data curation efforts center on the quality of a dataset. However, most of these existing methods are (i) offline, i.e. they produce a static dataset from a set of predetermined filtering criteria, and (ii) concept

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Group Diffusion: Enhancing Image Generation by Unlocking Cross-Sample Collaboration

CVPR 2026

In this work, we explore an untapped signal in diffusion model inference. While all previous methods generate images independently at inference, we instead ask if samples can be generated collaboratively. We propose Group Diffusion, unlocking the attention mechanism to be shared across images, rathe

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

mCLM: A Modular Chemical Language Model that Generates Functional and Makeable Molecules

ICLR 2026oral

Despite their ability to understand chemical knowledge, large language models (LLMs) remain limited in their capacity to propose novel molecules with desired functions (e.g., drug-like properties). In addition, the molecules that LLMs propose can often be challenging to make, and are almost never co…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

All Languages Matter: Evaluating LMMs on Culturally Diverse 100 Languages

CVPR 2025highlight

Existing Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) generally focus on only a few regions and languages. As LMMs continue to improve, it is increasingly important to ensure they understand cultural contexts, respect local sensitivities, and support low-resource languages, all while effectively integrating corr…

2025

X-Fusion: Introducing New Modality to Frozen Large Language Models

ICCV 2025poster

We propose X-Fusion, a framework that extends pretrained Large Language Models (LLMs) for multimodal tasks while preserving their language capabilities. X-Fusion employs a dual-tower design with modality-specific weights, keeping the LLM's parameters frozen while integrating vision-specific informat…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Yo'Chameleon: Personalized Vision and Language Generation

CVPR 2025poster

Large Multimodal Models (e.g., GPT-4, Gemini, Chameleon) have evolved into powerful tools with millions of users. However, they remain generic models and lack personalized knowledge of specific user concepts. Previous work has explored personalization for text generation, yet it remains unclear how…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2024

Better Alignment with Instruction Back-and-Forth Translation

EMNLP 2024finding

We propose a new method, instruction back-and-forth translation, to improve the quality of instruction-tuning data used for aligning large language models (LLMs). Given preprocessed texts from an initial web corpus (e.g. Dolma (Soldaini et al., 2024)), we generate synthetic instructions using the ba…

2024

DataComp-LM: In search of the next generation of training sets for language models

NeurIPS 2024poster

We introduce DataComp for Language Models, a testbed for controlled dataset experiments with the goal of improving language models. As part of DCLM, we provide a standardized corpus of 240T tokens extracted from Common Crawl, effective pretraining recipes based on the OpenLM framework, and a broad s…

Cited by 64SourcePDFScholar
2024

Edit One for All: Interactive Batch Image Editing

CVPR 2024poster

In recent years image editing has advanced remarkably. With increased human control it is now possible to edit an image in a plethora of ways; from specifying in text what we want to change to straight up dragging the contents of the image in an interactive point-based manner. However most of the fo…

Cited by 4SourcePDFScholar
2024

Multilingual Diversity Improves Vision-Language Representations

NeurIPS 2024spotlight

Massive web-crawled image-text datasets lay the foundation for recent progress in multimodal learning. These datasets are designed with the goal of training a model to do well on standard computer vision benchmarks, many of which, however, have been shown to be English-centric (e.g., ImageNet). Cons…

Cited by 8SourcePDFScholar
2024

Yo'LLaVA: Your Personalized Language and Vision Assistant

NeurIPS 2024poster

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have shown remarkable capabilities across a variety of tasks (e.g., image captioning, visual question answering). While broad, their knowledge remains generic (e.g., recognizing a dog), and they are unable to handle personalized subjects (e.g., recognizing a user's pet…

2023

DataComp: In search of the next generation of multimodal datasets

NeurIPS 2023oral

Multimodal datasets are a critical component in recent breakthroughs such as CLIP, Stable Diffusion and GPT-4, yet their design does not receive the same research attention as model architectures or training algorithms. To address this shortcoming in the machine learning ecosystem, we introduce Data…

2023

Improving multimodal datasets with image captioning

NeurIPS 2023poster

Massive web datasets play a key role in the success of large vision-language models like CLIP and Flamingo. However, the raw web data is noisy, and existing filtering methods to reduce noise often come at the expense of data diversity. Our work focuses on caption quality as one major source of noise…

Cited by 81SourcePDFScholar
2023

Language-Conditioned Observation Models for Visual Object Search

IROS 2023poster

Object search is a challenging task because when given complex language descriptions (e.g., “find the white cup on the table”), the robot must move its camera through the environment and recognize the described object. Previous works map language descriptions to a set of fixed object detectors with…

Cited by 3SourceScholar
2023

On the Connection between Pre-training Data Diversity and Fine-tuning Robustness

NeurIPS 2023spotlight

Pre-training has been widely adopted in deep learning to improve model performance, especially when the training data for a target task is limited. In our work, we seek to understand the implications of this training strategy on the generalization properties of downstream models. More specifically,…

Cited by 21SourcePDFScholar
2023

Visual Instruction Inversion: Image Editing via Image Prompting

NeurIPS 2023poster

Text-conditioned image editing has emerged as a powerful tool for editing images. However, in many situations, language can be ambiguous and ineffective in describing specific image edits. When faced with such challenges, visual prompts can be a more informative and intuitive way to convey ideas. We…

Cited by 48SourcePDFScholar
2022

Quality Not Quantity: On the Interaction between Dataset Design and Robustness of CLIP

NeurIPS 2022accept

Web-crawled datasets have enabled remarkable generalization capabilities in recent image-text models such as CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image pre-training) or Flamingo, but little is known about the dataset creation processes. In this work, we introduce a testbed of six publicly available data sourc…

2021

Do Wide and Deep Networks Learn the Same Things? Uncovering How Neural Network Representations Vary with Width and Depth

ICLR 2021poster

A key factor in the success of deep neural networks is the ability to scale models to improve performance by varying the architecture depth and width. This simple property of neural network design has resulted in highly effective architectures for a variety of tasks. Nevertheless, there is limited u…

2021

Lipstick Ain't Enough: Beyond Color Matching for In-the-Wild Makeup Transfer

CVPR 2021poster

Makeup transfer is the task of applying on a source face the makeup style from a reference image. Real-life makeups are diverse and wild, which cover not only color-changing but also patterns, such as stickers, blushes, and jewelries. However, existing works overlooked the latter components and conf…

Cited by 77PDFcodeScholar
2020

Concept Bottleneck Models

ICML 2020poster

We seek to learn models that we can interact with using high-level concepts: if the model did not think there was a bone spur in the x-ray, would it still predict severe arthritis? State-of-the-art models today do not typically support the manipulation of concepts like "the existence of bone spurs",…

2020

Robot Object Retrieval with Contextual Natural Language Queries

RSS 2020poster

Natural language object retrieval is a highly useful yet challenging task for robots in human-centric environments. Previous work has primarily focused on commands specifying the desired object's type such as "scissors" and/or visual attributes such as "red," thus limiting the robot to only known ob…

2019

Grounding Language Attributes to Objects using Bayesian Eigenobjects

IROS 2019poster

We develop a system to disambiguate object instances within the same class based on simple physical descriptions. The system takes as input a natural language phrase and a depth image containing a segmented object and predicts how similar the observed object is to the object described by the phrase.…

Cited by 23SourceScholar
2019

Planning with State Abstractions for Non-Markovian Task Specifications

RSS 2019poster

Often times, we specify tasks for a robot using temporal language that can also span different levels of abstraction. The example command "go to the kitchen before going to the second floor" contains spatial abstraction, given that "floor" consists of individual rooms that can also be referred to in…