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I'm a PhD student at MIT, working on AI and robotics. I'm currently advised by Priya Donti and Pulkit Agrawal. I earned my MS at CMU with Zac Manchester in the Robotic Exploration Lab, and my BS in Control Engineering and Automation at HUST. I have also been a Robotics Student Fellow in the Robotic Systems Lab at ETH Zurich, and worked in R&D at VinRobotics and Viettel Aerospace Institute. |
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Jul 2026Contact-UAN won the Best Paper Award at the RSS 2026 Workshop on Robot World Models. Jun 2026TD-GRPC was accepted at IROS 2026. May 2026I served on the program committee for the RoboARCH workshop at ICRA 2026. Jan 2026Conic-TinyMPC was accepted at ICRA 2026. Aug 2025The humanoid robots I helped build have made their public debut! 🤖 Aug 2025I started my PhD at MIT EECS. ✨ Aug 2025DEQ-MPC was accepted at CoRL 2025, Korea. Jul 2025Model Tensor Planning was accepted at TMLR. May 2025A proposal was submitted to the Amazon Research Award, with Laurent El Ghaoui. May 2025Papers were submitted to TMLR, CoRL, Humanoids and workshops, with An, Minh and Swami. Apr 2025I served on the program committee for the RoboARCH workshop at ICRA 2025. Oct 2024One paper was accepted at the CoRL 2024 Workshop on Differentiable Optimization Everywhere. Jul 2024Our work was featured on the Bitcraze blog, the developers of the Crazyflie. Jul 2024We were the Runner-up of the Best Poster Award, IEEE TC on Model-based Optimization for Robotics. Jun 2024Two papers were accepted at two RSS 2024 Workshops: Frontiers of Optimization for Robotics (Spotlight Talk), and Learning for Assistive Robotics. May 2024TinyMPC won the Best Paper Award in Automation at ICRA 2024. Apr 2024TinyMPC was selected as a finalist for 3 ICRA Paper Awards. Mar 2024TinyMPC with new capabilities is now available on arXiv. Mar 2024I received the Best Poster Award at the MS Research Symposium with the TinyMPC poster. Jan 2024TinyMPC was accepted to ICRA 2024. Oct 2023My undergraduate research on formation control and RL was accepted to IJRNC. Jul 2023I started my ETH Robotics Student Fellowship at RSL. Jul 2023I participated in the ETH Robotics Summer School. 🤖 May 2023My team advanced to the semi-finals of the F1TENTH competition. Sep 2022I joined Zac Manchester in the Robotic Exploration (REx) Lab. 🚀 Aug 2022I started my graduate study at Carnegie Mellon University. ✨ |
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I'm driven by elegant solution methods that target high performance, safety guarantees, data efficiency, and robust generalization: key milestones toward embodied intelligence. I explore various theoretical and practical aspects of embodied intelligence, drawing on my background in robotics, controls, differentiable optimization, and machine learning. |
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Khang Nguyen, An T. Le, Khai Nguyen, Jan Peters, Manfred Huber, Ngo Anh Vien, Minh Nhat Vu International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2026 Blends temporal-difference learning with a group-relative policy constraint to train stable, sample-efficient humanoid locomotion. arXiv |
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Ishaan Mahajan*, Khai Nguyen*, Sam Schoedel*, Elakhya Nedumaran, Moises Mata, Brian Plancher, Zachary Manchester International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2026 Extends TinyMPC with second-order-cone constraints and code generation, bringing conic MPC to microcontrollers. arXiv / project page / code |
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Khai Nguyen, Petros Ellinas, Anvita Bhagavathula, Priya L. Donti Preprint, 2026 Trains amortized optimizers with cheap, approximate labels instead of costly optimal solutions, without sacrificing quality. arXiv |
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Swaminathan Gurumurthy, Khai Nguyen, Arun Bishop, Zachary Manchester, Zico Kolter Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL), 2025 Casts MPC as a deep equilibrium model, jointly solving the control optimization and network inference in one fixed point. openreview / project page |
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Thai An Le, Khai Nguyen, Nhat Minh Vu, Joao Carvalho, Jan Peters Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR), 2025 ✨ J2C CertificateJ2C Certificate; presented at ICLR 2026. A sampling-based planner that exploits tensor structure to generate smooth, diverse trajectories efficiently. openreview / project page / code |
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Emre Adabag*, Xuyei Bu*, Khai Nguyen*, Samuel Schoedel*, Anoushka Alavilli, Miloni Atal, William Gerard, Elakhya Nedumaran, Zachary Manchester, Brian Plancher RSS 2024 Workshop on Frontiers of Optimization for Robotics ✨ Spotlight Talk (~20%) Benchmarks (non)linear MPC across the compute spectrum, from microcontrollers to GPUs. pdf / venue / poster |
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Khai Nguyen*, Yi-Hung Chiu*, Prakrit Tyagi*, Saurav Kambil*, Inseung Kang RSS 2024 Workshop on Learning for Assistive Robotics A learning system that plans legible, viewpoint-aware robot motions so people can read the robot's intent. pdf / venue / poster |
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Khai Nguyen*, Sam Schoedel*, Anoushka Alavilli*, Brian Plancher, Zachary Manchester International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2024 🏆 Best Paper🏆 Best Paper Award in Automation at ICRA 2024.🏆 Finalist, Best Conference Paper & Best Student Paper, ICRA 2024.🏆 Best Poster Award, CMU MechE Symposium (top 10%).🏆 Runner-up, Best Poster Award, TC on Model-based Optimization for Robotics. A fast, low-memory ADMM-based MPC solver that runs on resource-constrained microcontrollers, demonstrated on tiny drones. arXiv / project page / code / video / poster |
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Khai Nguyen, Van Trong Dang, Dinh Duong Pham, Phuong Nam Dao International Journal of Robust and Nonlinear Control (IJRNC), 2023 A reinforcement-learning strategy for robust formation control of multiple autonomous surface vehicles. paper |
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Khai Nguyen Bachelor's Thesis, Hanoi University of Science and Technology, 2021 Adaptive reinforcement learning for robust optimal control of uncertain nonlinear systems. thesis / slides |
| Template inspired by Jon Barron. |