Thang M. Pham

I recently completed my Ph.D. in Computer Science at Auburn University advised by Prof. Anh Nguyen, and I am actively seeking full-time research/engineering positions in machine learning and artificial intelligence. My doctoral work has contributed to advancing language models’ capabilities in understanding texts and images, with findings that have been recognized by MIT Technology Review and published in top-tier conferences including ACL, NAACL, or EACL. My current research interests are efficient small language models, model optimization, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and multi-agent systems.

During my Ph.D., I completed three research internships at Adobe Research working with Trung Bui, Franck Dernoncourt and David Seunghyun Yoon, where I developed efficient small language models for mobile devices, instruction-following and human preference datasets for image editing, and creating a dataset benchmark for semantic similarity and search. Before my Ph.D., I spent 6 years in industry roles, including 2.5 years as a Research Engineer at National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science & Technology (AIST) collaborating with Makoto Miwa and Mohammad Golam Sohrab to build deep learning systems in biomedical text mining. I also worked as a Software Engineer for 3.5 years, developing over-the-top mobile applications for distant communication. I completed my Honors Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science at the University of Science (HCMUS) in Vietnam, where my thesis focused on scene text detection and recognition.