An Vo

MS student @ Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology (KAIST)

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I am a second-year MS student at KAIST, working with Daeyoung Kim and Anh Totti Nguyen. My MS program is fully funded by Hyundai CMK Global Scholarship (a fully funded scholarship for top Southeast Asian students). Prior to join KAIST, I obtained my BS degree as the valedictorian at Vietnam National University - Ho Chi Minh City (VNU-HCM) in 2023 with Ngoc Hoang Luong.

I am broadly interested in Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision Language Models (VLMs), especially in making them more trustworthy and explainable in edge/hard cases. My works have been accepted at top venues: ICML, AAAI, GECCO, etc.

I am also the lead author of VLMs are Biased, a paper that was featured on Hacker News (front page; top-5), LinkedIn, Gary Marcus's article (GPT-5: Overdue, overhyped and underwhelming), Lucas Beyer’s tweet,. In this work, we introduce VLMBias, a benchmark for evaluating visual counting in VLMs. We show that state-of-the-art models (e.g., o3, o4-mini, Gemini 2.5 Pro, Claude 3.7 Sonnet) achieve 100% accuracy counting on images of popular subjects (e.g. knowing that the Adidas logo has 3 stripes and a dog has 4 legs) but are only ~17% accurate in counting in counterfactual images (e.g. counting stripes in a 4-striped Adidas-like logo or counting legs in a 5-legged dog).

news

Jul 2025 I will attend ICML 2025 at Vancouver to present B-score and VLMs are Biased. Visit our poster to discuss or grab a coffee. Happy to connect with everyone!
Jun 2025 I will serve as a reviewer for AAAI 2026, IEEE Transactions on Industrial Information (IF=11.7), and IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics: Systems (IF=8.7).
Jun 2025 One preprint on arXiv: VLMs are Biased
May 2025 One paper has been accepted to ICML 2025
Jan-May 2025 This year, I will serve as a reviewer for multiple AI venues: IEEE CEC 2025, IJCNN 2025, BMVC 2025, and IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation (IF=11.7).
Dec 2024 One paper has been accepted to AAAI 2025
Mar 2024 One paper has been accepted to GEECO 2024
Jan 2024 One paper has been accepted to CEC 2024
Jan 2024 I have been admitted to the MS program at KAIST School of Computing for Spring 2024 and received the KAIST Scholarship. A new journey!
Jan 2024 I have been chosen as a scholar for the Hyundai CMK Global Scholarship 2024, a prestigious scholarship for top Southest Asian students
Jan 2024 This year, I will serve as a reviewer for IEEE CEC 2024
Jul 2023 One paper has been accepted to Informatica
Apr 2023 One paper has been accepted to GECCO 2023 (Late-breaking Abstract)
Oct-Dec 2022 One paper has been accepted to SoICT 2022 and has achieved Best Paper Award