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Kien T. Pham (TK)

PhD Student @ HKUST

About Me

Hi👋, I am currently a PhD student at HKUST, co-advised by Prof. Long Chen in the LONG Group and Prof. Qifeng Chen in the Visual Intelligence Lab. Previously, I completed my MPhil at HKUST under the guidance of Prof. Qifeng Chen, a journey filled with joy and success. Before that, I earned my BSc Degree with First Class Honors, double majoring in Data Science and Computer Science. I am also an alum of the S.S. Chern Class, an elite class for students with demonstrated mathematical excellence.

Currently, my research focuses on Multimodal Generation and Understanding. Previously, I have worked on some creative applications in AIGC such as Image Composition. Additionally, I have also been engaged in projects exploring Visual Perception for Autonomous Driving and Humanoid Robotics.

Feel free to contact me by email if you are interested in discussing or collaborating with me!

News
[Oct. 2024]

✈️ I'm very excited to attend ACM MM 2024 in Melbourne, Australia to present our paper!

[Oct. 2024]

📝 I'm serving as a Reviewer for ICLR 2025 and AISTAT 2025.

[Jul. 2024]

🥳 One paper accepted to ACM MM 2024.

[Jun. 2024]

📝 I'm serving as a Reviewer for NeurIPS 2024.

[Jun. 2024]

🥳 One paper accepted to RO-MAN 2024.

[May. 2024]

✈️ I'm very excited to attend ICRA 2024 in Yokohama, Japan to present our paper!

[Apr. 2024]

🤩 We launch project page for our image composition framework: TALE.

[Jan. 2024]

🥳 One paper accepted to ICRA 2024.

Publications
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A Dialogue System Architecture for Humanoid Robots Targeting Patient Interview Tasks

Yifan Shen∗, Dingdong Liu∗, Yejin Bang∗, Ho Shu Chan, Rita Frieske, Hoo Choun Chung, Jay Nieles, Tianjia Zhang, Kien T. Pham, Wai Yi Rosita Cheng, Yini Fang, Qifeng Chen, Pascale Fung, Xiaojuan Ma, Bertram Shi

IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN), 2024

3rd Place for the Best Industry Application Award

[Proceedings]
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Cross-Cluster Shifting for Efficient and Effective 3D Object Detection in Autonomous Driving

Zhili Chen, Kien T. Pham, Maosheng Ye, Zhiqiang Shen, Qifeng Chen

IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2024

[arXiv] [Proceedings]
Projects
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A Dialogue System Architecture for Humanoid Robots Targeting Patient Interview Tasks

Develop a visual cue extraction framework to enhance the ability of a nurse robot (Grace) to interact and engage with patients during interviews. Various visual perception understanding tasks are explored including Object Detection, Tracking, and Reidentification, 2D-3D Body/Head Pose Estimation, Facial Expression Recognition and Analysis, Abnormal Action Recognition...

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An approach for medical cancer image generation leveraging pretrained Stable Diffusion

Propose a method for generating highly realistic medical cancer images given any pairs of non-tumorous background and tumour object images, directly utilizing the pretrained Stable Diffusion.

Project Report, 2024

[PDF]
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FMLU: Weighted Federated Mutual Learning with Uncertainty-aware Balancing Scheme

Attempt to improve FML by quantifying the uncertainty levels of the meme and local models for each client and leverage it as the weighting scheme for both global model aggregation and client update stages.

Project Report, 2023

[PDF]
Education
HKUST
Hong Kong
Sep. 2018 – Present
PhD Student in Computer Science and Engineering, co-advised by Prof. Long Chen and Prof. Qifeng Chen
MPhil Student in Computer Science and Engineering, advised by Prof. Qifeng Chen
BSc in Data Science and Computer Science - First Class Honours
Industry Experience
GMO-Z.com RUNSYSTEM
Vietnam, On-site
Feb. 2020 - May. 2020
AI Intern - Working on OCR-centric tasks.
viAct
Hong Kong, Remote
Apr. 2021 - Aug. 2021
AI Trainee - Working on Video Analytics for ConTech Domain.
Teaching

2022 SPRING, 2024 FALL: COMP1021 - Introduction to Computer Science

2023 FALL: COMP4471/ELEC4240 - Deep Learning in Computer Vision

Services

Conference Reviewer: NeurIPS 2024, ICLR 2025, AISTAT 2025

Awards & Scholarships

RTG Award, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

2023-2024

Postgraduate Studentship

2022-2024

Chern Class Achievement Scholarship

2022

Chern Class Talent Scholarship

2020-2022

Chern Class Scholarship

2019

Heart Free Lodge Scholarship

2018

University Scholarship

2018-2022

Dean's List

Spring 2018, 2020; Fall 2019, 2021