Source author record

Tuan Nguyen

Tuan Nguyen appears in the imported research catalog. Authorship, coauthor and topic links are available while profile ownership is still unclaimed.

ResearcherUnclaimed source record

Catalog footprint

What is connected

13works
15topics
4close collaborators

Actions

Connect this record

Log in to claim

Research graph

See the researcher in context

Open full explorer

Inspect adjacent papers, topics, institutions and collaborators without losing the researcher page.

Building this map preview

BZPEER is loading the nearby papers, people, topics and institutions for this page.

Published work

13 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

$\varepsilon$-Good Action Identification in Fixed-Budget Monte Carlo Tree Search

We study the fixed-budget max-min action identification problem in depth-2 max-min trees, an important special case of Monte Carlo Tree Search. A learner sequentially allocates $T$ samples to leaves and then recommends a subtree whose minimum leaf value is largest. Motivated by approximate planning, we focus on $\varepsilon$-good subtree identification, where any subtree whose min value is within $\varepsilon$ of the optimal maximin value is acceptable. Our main contribution is an $\varepsilon$-agnostic algorithm: it does not require $\varepsilon$ as input, but achieves instance-dependent error bounds for every meaningful $\varepsilon$. We show that the misidentification probability decays as $\exp(-\widetildeΘ(T/H_2(\varepsilon)))$, where $H_2(\varepsilon)$ captures both cross-subtree and within-subtree gaps. When each subtree has a single leaf, the problem reduces to standard fixed-budget best-arm identification, and our analysis recovers, up to accelerating factors, known $\varepsilon$-good guarantees for halving-style methods while giving a new $\varepsilon$-good guarantee for Successive Rejects. On the lower-bound side, we provide complementary positive and negative results showing that max-min identification has a different hardness structure from standard $K$-armed bandits. To our knowledge, this is the first provable fixed-budget algorithmic guarantee for max-min action identification.

preprint2026arXiv

Training-Free Cultural Alignment of Large Language Models via Persona Disagreement

Large language models increasingly mediate decisions that turn on moral judgement, yet a growing body of evidence shows that their implicit preferences are not culturally neutral. Existing cultural alignment methods either require per-country preference data and fine-tuning budgets or assume white-box access to model internals that commercial APIs do not expose. In this work, we focus on this realistic black-box, public-data-only regime and observe that within-country sociodemographic disagreement, not consensus, is the primary steering signal. We introduce DISCA (Disagreement-Informed Steering for Cultural Alignment), an inference-time method that instantiates each country as a panel of World-Values-Survey-grounded persona agents and converts their disagreement into a bounded, loss-averse logit correction. Across 20 countries and 7 open-weight backbones (2B--70B), DISCA reduces cultural misalignment on MultiTP by 10--24% on the six backbones >=3.8B, and 2--7% on open-ended scenarios, without changing any weights. Our results suggest that inference-time calibration is a scalable alternative to fine-tuning for serving the long tail of global moral preferences.

preprint2025arXiv

Time-varying Mixing Matrix Design for Energy-efficient Decentralized Federated Learning

We consider the design of mixing matrices to minimize the operation cost for decentralized federated learning (DFL) in wireless networks, with focus on minimizing the maximum per-node energy consumption. As a critical hyperparameter for DFL, the mixing matrix controls both the convergence rate and the needs of agent-to-agent communications, and has thus been studied extensively. However, existing designs mostly focused on minimizing the communication time, leaving open the minimization of per-node energy consumption that is critical for energy-constrained devices. This work addresses this gap through a theoretically-justified solution for mixing matrix design that aims at minimizing the maximum per-node energy consumption until convergence, while taking into account the broadcast nature of wireless communications. Based on a novel convergence theorem that allows arbitrarily time-varying mixing matrices, we propose a multi-phase design framework that activates time-varying communication topologies under optimized budgets to trade off the per-iteration energy consumption and the convergence rate while balancing the energy consumption across nodes. Our evaluations based on real data have validated the efficacy of the proposed solution in combining the low energy consumption of sparse mixing matrices and the fast convergence of dense mixing matrices.

preprint2022arXiv

On Label Shift in Domain Adaptation via Wasserstein Distance

We study the label shift problem between the source and target domains in general domain adaptation (DA) settings. We consider transformations transporting the target to source domains, which enable us to align the source and target examples. Through those transformations, we define the label shift between two domains via optimal transport and develop theory to investigate the properties of DA under various DA settings (e.g., closed-set, partial-set, open-set, and universal settings). Inspired from the developed theory, we propose Label and Data Shift Reduction via Optimal Transport (LDROT) which can mitigate the data and label shifts simultaneously. Finally, we conduct comprehensive experiments to verify our theoretical findings and compare LDROT with state-of-the-art baselines.

preprint2021arXiv

$π-π$ scattering, QED and finite-volume quantization

Using the Coulomb gauge formulation of QED we present a lattice QCD procedure to calculate the $π^+π^+$ scattering phase shift including the effects of the Coulomb potential which appears in this formulation. The approach described here incorporates the effects of relativity and avoids finite-volume corrections that vanish as a power of the volume in which the lattice calculation is performed. This is the first step in developing a complete lattice QCD calculation of the electromagnetic and isospin-breaking light-quark mass contributions to $\varepsilon'$, the parameter describing direct CP violating effects in $K_L\toππ$ decay.

preprint2014arXiv

Optimal Regularization Parameters for General-Form Tikhonov Regularization

In this work we consider the problem of finding optimal regularization parameters for general-form Tikhonov regularization using training data. We formulate the general-form Tikhonov solution as a spectral filtered solution using the generalized singular value decomposition of the matrix of the forward model and a given regularization matrix. Then, we find the optimal regularization parameter by minimizing the average of the errors between the filtered solutions and the true data. We extend the approach to the multi-parameter Tikhonov problem for the case where all the matrices involved are simultaneously diagonalizable. For problems where this is not the case, we describe an approach to compute optimal or near-optimal regularization parameters by using operator approximations for the original problem. Several tests are performed for 1D and 2D examples using different norms on the errors, showing the effectiveness of this approach.

preprint2014arXiv

Radio Resource Allocation for Scalable Video Services over Wireless Cellular Networks

Good quality video services always require higher bandwidth. Hence, to provide the video services e.g., multicast/broadcast services (MBS) and unicast services along with the existing voice, internet, and other background traffic services over the wireless cellular networks, it is required to efficiently manage the wireless resources in order to reduce the overall forced call termination probability, to maximize the overall service quality, and to maximize the revenue. Fixed bandwidth allocation for the MBS sessions either reduces the quality of the MBS videos and bandwidth utilization or increases the overall forced call termination probability and of course the handover call dropping probability as well. Scalable Video Coding (SVC) technique allows the variable bit rate allocation for the video services. In this paper, we propose a bandwidth allocation scheme that efficiently allocates bandwidth among the MBS sessions and the non-MBS traffic calls (e.g., voice, unicast, internet, and other background traffic). The proposed scheme reduces the bandwidth allocation for the MBS sessions during the congested traffic condition only to accommodate more calls in the system. Instead of allocating fixed bandwidths for the BMS sessions and the non-MBS traffic, our scheme allocates variable bandwidths for them. However, the minimum quality of the videos is guaranteed by allocating minimum bandwidth for them. Using the mathematical and numerical analyses, we show that the proposed scheme maximizes the bandwidth utilization and significantly reduces the overall forced call termination probability as well as the handover call dropping probability.

preprint2012arXiv

Keeler's theorem and products of distinct transpositions

An episode of Futurama features a two-body mind-switching machine which will not work more than once on the same pair of bodies. After the Futurama community engages in a mind-switching spree, the question is asked, "Can the switching be undone so as to restore all minds to their original bodies?" Ken Keeler found an algorithm that undoes any mind-scrambling permutation with the aid of two "outsiders." We refine Keeler's result by providing a more efficient algorithm that uses the smallest possible number of switches. We also present best possible algorithms for undoing two natural sequences of switches, each sequence effecting a cyclic mind-scrambling permutation in the symmetric group S_n. Finally, we give necessary and sufficient conditions on m and n for the identity permutation to be expressible as a product of m distinct transpositions in S_n.

preprint2012arXiv

Model-Lite Case-Based Planning

There is increasing awareness in the planning community that depending on complete models impedes the applicability of planning technology in many real world domains where the burden of specifying complete domain models is too high. In this paper, we consider a novel solution for this challenge that combines generative planning on incomplete domain models with a library of plan cases that are known to be correct. While this was arguably the original motivation for case-based planning, most existing case-based planners assume (and depend on) from-scratch planners that work on complete domain models. In contrast, our approach views the plan generated with respect to the incomplete model as a "skeletal plan" and augments it with directed mining of plan fragments from library cases. We will present the details of our approach and present an empirical evaluation of our method in comparison to a state-of-the-art case-based planner that depends on complete domain models.

preprint2011arXiv

Distinct counting with a self-learning bitmap

Counting the number of distinct elements (cardinality) in a dataset is a fundamental problem in database management. In recent years, due to many of its modern applications, there has been significant interest to address the distinct counting problem in a data stream setting, where each incoming data can be seen only once and cannot be stored for long periods of time. Many probabilistic approaches based on either sampling or sketching have been proposed in the computer science literature, that only require limited computing and memory resources. However, the performances of these methods are not scale-invariant, in the sense that their relative root mean square estimation errors (RRMSE) depend on the unknown cardinalities. This is not desirable in many applications where cardinalities can be very dynamic or inhomogeneous and many cardinalities need to be estimated. In this paper, we develop a novel approach, called self-learning bitmap (S-bitmap) that is scale-invariant for cardinalities in a specified range. S-bitmap uses a binary vector whose entries are updated from 0 to 1 by an adaptive sampling process for inferring the unknown cardinality, where the sampling rates are reduced sequentially as more and more entries change from 0 to 1. We prove rigorously that the S-bitmap estimate is not only unbiased but scale-invariant. We demonstrate that to achieve a small RRMSE value of $ε$ or less, our approach requires significantly less memory and consumes similar or less operations than state-of-the-art methods for many common practice cardinality scales. Both simulation and experimental studies are reported.

preprint2011arXiv

Planning with Partial Preference Models

Current work in planning with preferences assume that the user's preference models are completely specified and aim to search for a single solution plan. In many real-world planning scenarios, however, the user probably cannot provide any information about her desired plans, or in some cases can only express partial preferences. In such situations, the planner has to present not only one but a set of plans to the user, with the hope that some of them are similar to the plan she prefers. We first propose the usage of different measures to capture quality of plan sets that are suitable for such scenarios: domain-independent distance measures defined based on plan elements (actions, states, causal links) if no knowledge of the user's preferences is given, and the Integrated Convex Preference measure in case the user's partial preference is provided. We then investigate various heuristic approaches to find set of plans according to these measures, and present empirical results demonstrating the promise of our approach.

preprint2011arXiv

Synthesizing Robust Plans under Incomplete Domain Models

Most current planners assume complete domain models and focus on generating correct plans. Unfortunately, domain modeling is a laborious and error-prone task. While domain experts cannot guarantee completeness, often they are able to circumscribe the incompleteness of the model by providing annotations as to which parts of the domain model may be incomplete. In such cases, the goal should be to generate plans that are robust with respect to any known incompleteness of the domain. In this paper, we first introduce annotations expressing the knowledge of the domain incompleteness, and formalize the notion of plan robustness with respect to an incomplete domain model. We then propose an approach to compiling the problem of finding robust plans to the conformant probabilistic planning problem. We present experimental results with Probabilistic-FF, a state-of-the-art planner, showing the promise of our approach.

preprint2010arXiv

Improving the Johnson-Lindenstrauss Lemma

The Johnson-Lindenstrauss Lemma allows for the projection of $n$ points in $p-$dimensional Euclidean space onto a $k-$dimensional Euclidean space, with $k \ge \frac{24\ln \emph{n}}{3ε^2-2ε^3}$, so that the pairwise distances are preserved within a factor of $1\pmε$. Here, working directly with the distributions of the random distances rather than resorting to the moment generating function technique, an improvement on the lower bound for $k$ is obtained. The additional reduction in dimension when compared to bounds found in the literature, is at least $13\%$, and, in some cases, up to $30\%$ additional reduction is achieved. Using the moment generating function technique, we further provide a lower bound for $k$ using pairwise $L_2$ distances in the space of points to be projected and pairwise $L_1$ distances in the space of the projected points. Comparison with the results obtained in the literature shows that the bound presented here provides an additional $36-40\%$ reduction.