Vietnamese student lands lead-author paper at AI conference that rejects 73% of submissions
A valedictorian of the elite computer science talent program at Hanoi University of Science and Technology has had papers accepted at two of the world's top conferences on machine learning and natural language processing.
Le Danh Vinh, a standout Vietnamese student, earned a distinguished GPA of 3.92 from the University of Bac Ninh in September. Currently employed at VinMotion, a humanoid robotics company under Vingroup, Vinh is also part of DreamAI, a research group led by Trung Le, a machine learning expert from Monash University in Australia. Vinh expressed relief at both graduating with top honors and discovering a promising field.
Notably, his path to academic success was unconventional; he entered the university without an entrance exam in 2022, having won second prize in a national mathematics contest during high school.
Vinh's academic journey was marked by self-study and exploration beyond standard curricula. He achieved a perfect 4.0 GPA in his first two semesters, won first prize in analysis at the national Mathematical Olympiad, and eventually focused on artificial intelligence. His internship search initially yielded no results, but a collaboration with ZenAI, a generative AI startup, provided opportunities to lead projects and conduct research. Professor Ngo Van Linh, Vinh's mentor, facilitated this collaboration.
Vinh's research interests center on improving AI efficiency, particularly in reducing computational costs and speeding up model inference. He specializes in vision-language models (VLMs), which process and integrate various data types, such as images and text. Balancing his academic workload with VinMotion's demands, Vinh faced intense pressure to finalize a paper for the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) 2026.
Despite short nights of sleep, he persevered with the paper, which he authored as the first co-author, while managing his university studies. ICML accepted Vinh's work, recognizing its significance among the conference's rigorous review process. The conference, rated A* by CORE, one of the highest ranks in computer science, saw over 73% of over 24,000 submissions rejected, underscoring the high caliber of the reviewed work.
Vinh's academic achievements extend beyond ICML, as he co-authored a paper accepted for presentation at EMNLP 2026, a leading conference on natural language processing, scheduled for Budapest in late October. Professor Linh commended Vinh's independent thinking and perseverance, noting his ability to maintain progress even when initial approaches did not yield expected results. Currently employed at VinMotion, Vinh aims to take on new challenges and further enhance his research experience before pursuing graduate studies.
Written by urgent.news from VnExpress International's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
