Toan Nguyen

CS PhD at USC

First-Year Ph.D. Student at the Department of Computer Science, University of Southern California, working with the Physical Superintelligence Lab & SLURM Lab.

Email: tientoan [at] usc [dot] edu

I am co-advised by Prof. Yue Wang and Prof. Daniel Seita. Prior to joining USC, I was an AI Resident at the FPT AI Center. I graduated with a bachelor's degree in Computer Science at Ho Chi Minh City University of Science.

I'm interested in anything that helps robots become more capable, generalizable, and trustworthy. My goal is to make robots not just perform tasks, but truly understand the world they act in.

Publications

Rethinking Progression of Memory State in Robotic Manipulation: An Object-Centric Perspective

Nhat Chung*, Taisei Hanyu*, Toan Nguyen, Huy Le, Frederick Bumgarner, Duy Nguyen Ho Minh, Khoa Vo, Kashu Yamazaki, Chase Rainwater, Tung Kieu, Anh Nguyen, Ngan Le

AAAI 2026

📄 Paper ↗ Project

Language-Driven 6-DoF Grasp Detection Using Negative Prompt Guidance

Toan Nguyen, Minh Nhat Vu, Baoru Huang, An Vuong, Quan Vuong, Dung Nguyen, Ngan Le, Thieu Vo, Anh Nguyen

ECCV 2024 🏆 ORAL PRESENTATION

📄 Paper ↗ Project ⌘ Code

HabiCrowd: A High Performance Simulator for Crowd-Aware Visual Navigation

An Vuong, Toan Nguyen, Minh Nhat Vu, Baoru Huang, Dung Nguyen, Binh Huynh, Thieu Vo, Anh Nguyen

IROS 2024

📄 Paper ↗ Project ⌘ Code

Language-Conditioned Affordance-Pose Detection in 3D Point Clouds

Toan Nguyen, Minh Nhat Vu, Baoru Huang, Tuan Vo, Vy Truong, Ngan Le, Thieu Vo, Bac Le, Anh Nguyen

ICRA 2024

📄 Paper ↗ Project ⌘ Code

Open-Vocabulary Affordance Detection using Knowledge Distillation and Text-Point Correlation

Tuan Vo, Minh Nhat Vu, Baoru Huang, Toan Nguyen, Ngan Le, Thieu Vo, Anh Nguyen

ICRA 2024

📄 Paper ⌘ Code

Language-Driven Scene Synthesis Using Multi-Conditional Diffusion Model

An Vuong, Minh Nhat Vu, Toan Nguyen, Baoru Huang, Dung Nguyen, Thieu Vo, Anh Nguyen

NeurIPS 2023

📄 Paper ↗ Project ⌘ Code

Open-Vocabulary Affordance Detection in 3D Point Clouds

Toan Nguyen, Minh Nhat Vu, An Vuong, Dung Nguyen, Thieu Vo, Ngan Le, Anh Nguyen

IROS 2023 🏅 BEST PAPER FINALIST 🎓 BEST STUDENT PAPER FINALIST

📄 Paper ↗ Project ⌘ Code

Other Projects

USC CSCI 699 - Robotic Perception

Active Perception with VLMs

We developed an active perception system leveraging vision-language models on a Dexmate Vega humanoid.

▶ Video

USC CSCI 699 - Robot Learning

3D Policy Learning with 3D Foundation Models

We leveraged 3D foundation models to reconstruct rich 3D scene representations for policy learning on an SO-100 robot arm, eliminating the need for expensive depth sensors.

Under Review

SlotVLA: Towards Modeling of Object-Relation Representations in Robotic Manipulation

Taisei Hanyu*, Nhat Chung*, Huy Le, Toan Nguyen, Yuki Ikebe, Anthony Gunderman, Duy Nguyen Ho Minh, Khoa Vo, Tung Kieu, Kashu Yamazaki, Chase Rainwater, Anh Nguyen, Ngan Le

📄 Paper

RoboDesign1M: A Large-scale Dataset for Robot Design Understanding

Tri Le, Toan Nguyen, Quang Tran, Quang Nguyen, Baoru Huang, Hoan Nguyen, Minh Nhat Vu, Tung Duc Ta, Anh Nguyen

📄 Paper

FurniMAS: Language-Guided Furniture Decoration using Multi-Agent System

Toan Nguyen, Tri Le, Quang Nguyen, Anh Nguyen

📄 Paper

Professional Services

Conference Reviewer: ICRA 2026, WACV 2026, IROS 2025, ECCV 2024, ICRA 2024, IROS 2024
Journal Reviewer: RA-L 2025