Toan Nguyen
tientoan [at] usc [dot] edu
I am a second-year Ph.D. student at the Department of Computer Science, University of Southern California. 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.
Nowadays, I'm particularly interested in:
- Humanoid loco-manipulation: Developing whole-body control models that exploit the humanoid form factor to perform useful work in challenging settings.
- Long-context robot learning: Enabling in-context imitation learning and robots that can plan, track progress, and self-correct in complex and long-horizon tasks.
- Safety in robotics: Robots that work safely and reliably alongside humans in unstructured open-world environments.
Feel free to reach out if you'd like to discuss ideas or explore collaboration opportunities!
Publications
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.
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.
USC CSCI 662 - Advanced Natural Language Processing
Vision-Language Model as a Judge for Robot Policy A/B Evaluation
We used vision-language models as automated judges to perform pairwise A/B comparisons of robot policy rollouts, offering a scalable alternative to human evaluation.
Professional Services
- Teaching Assistant: USC CSCI 102 - Introduction to Programming Fall 2026
- Conference Reviewer: IROS 2026, ICRA 2026, WACV 2026, IROS 2025, ECCV 2024, ICRA 2024, IROS 2024
- Journal Reviewer: RA-L, T-RL
- Organizer: USC UROS robotics reading group and seminar series