Nghia Hoang receives NSF CAREER award for AI research

Nghia Hoang, assistant professor in WSU's School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, has received a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award for his work to improve the reliability of large AI models.

The prestigious five-year grants are intended to provide research support to young faculty beginning their careers who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education.

As part of the approximately $600,000 award, Hoang will work to improve the way that large AI models propagate information, making it easier to assess their reliability and better align them with new data and scientific knowledge.

Foundation models are large AI systems that learn from vast data sets and play a central role in science and technology. The complexity of these models, however, makes it difficult to recognize when their outputs are unreliable, especially in safety-critical settings such as wearable health monitoring and smart homes, said Hoang.

Furthermore, as hardware technologies evolve, new forms of data emerge from new types of sensors that often do not align with past data used to train the existing models.

"Current methods lack a systematic way to incorporate such information or assess when model outputs are unreliable," he said. "How these models encode information might also be disconnected from established scientific knowledge, such as human physiology."

Hoang's proposed research will develop a unified framework for integrating diverse data with scientific knowledge and a new way to show information flow within the models.

His approach treats the internal stages of a foundation model as snapshots of information flow, capturing how the statistical geometry of the model's internal features changes as information passes through it. Learning this flow makes it possible to track uncertainty in a more structured and lower-dimensional space, enabling accurate reliability estimates for large-scale models.

"The project's importance is enabling trustworthy decision support in large AI systems and educating a workforce adept at leveraging these technologies," he said.

With WSU since 2022, Hoang was previously a senior research scientist at Amazon Web Services AI labs, a research staff member at MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab and a postdoctoral research associate at the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems at MIT. Hoang holds a bachelor's degree from Vietnam National University and a PhD in computer science from the National University of Singapore.