Hi, I am Cuong Pham (my full name in Vietnamese is Phạm Anh Cường). I am a MS student in Machine Learning at MBZUAI, where I am fortunate to be supervised by Prof. Samuel Horváth and informally co-supervised by Prof. Praneeth Vepakomma.

My research interest lies on Optimization in general and Efficient Deep Learning in particular, for more detail, I am working mainly on Efficient Training/Fine-Tuning in Continual Learning & Federated Learning, and partially on SGD Optimization.

Before joining MBZUAI, I got my Honors BS in Information Technology from VNU-UET, Vietnam in 2023, where I was supervised by Prof. Quang-Thuy Ha and working closely with Dr. Van-Quang Nguyen on NLP and CV projects. I also have 2 years of experience in AI (with NLP, then CV and Data Science tasks).

Please take a look at my CV for more information.

For contact: My personal email is phamanhcuongvna2511 at gmail.com, and my current student email is cuong.pham at mbzuai.ac.ae.

🔥 News

• 08.2024:   I joined MBZUAI as a Master’s student in Machine Learning (with full scholarship), and my supervisor for my MS is Prof. Samuel Horváth.
• 06.2023:   I graduated with High Distinction degree in Information Technology (Honors Program) from VNU University of Engineering and Technology.

📝 Publications

• [C.5] TBD.
  Cuong Anh Pham, Praneeth Vepakomma, Samuel Horváth.
  (CPAL ‘26)

• [P.4] Polyak Stepsize: Estimating Optimal Functional Values Without Parameters or Prior Knowledge.
  Farshed Abdukhakimov, Cuong Anh Pham, Samuel Horváth, Martin Takáč, Slavomír Hanzely.
  (preprint ‘25, under-review draft)

• [P.3] SmallPlan: Leverage Small Language Models for Sequential Path Planning with Simulation-Powered, LLM-Guided Distillation
  Quang P.M. Pham, Khoi T. N. Nguyen, Nhi H. Doan, Cuong A. Pham, Qinbo Sun, Weimin Qi, Kentaro Inui, Dezhen Song
  (preprint ‘25, under-review draft)

• [P.2] KTVIC: A Vietnamese Image Captioning Dataset on the Life Domain
  Anh-Cuong Pham, Van-Quang Nguyen, Thi-Hong Vuong, Quang-Thuy Ha
  (preprint ‘24, short version of Bachelor’s thesis)

• [C.1] Memory-Based Method using Prototype Augmentation for Continual Relation Extraction
  Quynh-Trang Pham Thi, Anh-Cuong Pham, Ngoc-Huyen Ngo and Duc-Trong Le
  (IEEE RIVF ‘22)

🎖 Honors

• 06.2024, Fully-funded Master’s scholarship at MBZUAI.
• 2021-2023, Third Prizes (#5 Linear Algebra 2021, #6 Linear Algebra 2022, #5 Linear Algebra 2023) in VNU-UET Mathematics Olympiad. I was also #7 Calculus in the 2022 competition, but there were only prizes for top 6.
• 01.2019, Participation in the national Vietnam Mathematical Olympiad 2019 (representing Nghe An province, and was ranked ~#250/600 national).

📖 Education

• 08.2024 - 2026 (expected), MS in Machine Learning, Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (UAE).
• 08.2019 - 06.2023, BS in Information Technology (Honors Program), VNU University of Engineering and Technology (Vietnam).

💻 Professional Experience

• 10.2024 - current, Graduate Research Assistant at MBZUAI, UAE.
• 10.2023 - 07.2024, Data Scientist at Viettel Networks Corporation - Viettel Group, Vietnam.
• 09.2021 - 09.2023, Student Research Intern at DSKT Laboratory of VNU University of Engineering and Technology, Vietnam.
• 05.2022 - 08.2023, R&D Engineer at GHTK JSC, Vietnam.

🔍 References

• Dr. Samuel Horvath, Assistant Professor of Machine Learning at MBZUAI (UAE) [Email] [Website]
• Dr. Praneeth Vepakomma, Assistant Professor of Machine Learning at MBZUAI (UAE) and Visiting Professor at MIT IDSS [Email] [Website]
• Dr. Quang-Thuy Ha, Associate Professor and Former Vice President at VNU-UET (Vietnam) [Email] [Google Scholar]
• Dr. Van-Quang Nguyen, Researcher at RIKEN AIP & Tohoku University (Japan) [Email] [Google Scholar]