Tan Dat Nguyen

I am a PhD student at KAIST EE, working at Multimodal AI Lab under the supervision of Prof. Joon Son Chung. I received my MS from KAIST in February 2025 and continued as a PhD student in the same lab right after.

My research focuses on efficient speech generation, spanning model architecture, inference optimization, and post-training — with particular interest in LLM-based speech models. I'm open to academic collaborations — feel free to reach out at tandat.kaist@kaist.ac.kr.

In 2022, I graduated from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Ho Chi Minh University of Technology – VNU, advised by Dr. Duc Dung Nguyen at ML4U-AITech Lab.

News

2 papers
Accepted at ICASSP 2026
3 papers
Accepted at ICASSP 2025
1 paper
Accepted at ICASSP 2024

Selected Projects

FreGrad
ICASSP 2024 Oral

FreGrad

A lightweight diffusion vocoder that synthesizes high-fidelity speech in real-time by operating in the frequency domain.

Diffusion Vocoder Efficiency
SPADE
ICASSP 2026 Oral

SPADE

Compresses LLM-based TTS models via structured pruning and adaptive distillation — same voice quality, significantly lower compute.

Pruning Distillation LLM-TTS
MamTra
Under Review

MamTra

A hybrid backbone combining Mamba's linear recurrence with Transformer attention for efficient, expressive speech synthesis.

Mamba Transformer TTS

Publications

12 papers
·
7 first-authored
ICASSP ×6 Under Review ×2 Preprint ×1

C = Conference  ·  A = Preprint  ·  S = In Submission  ·  * = Equal contribution

Education

Mar 2025 –
Present

PhD in Electrical Engineering

Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Daejeon

Mar 2023 –
Feb 2025

MS in Electrical Engineering

Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Daejeon

Oct 2018 –
Oct 2022

BS in Computer Science

Ho Chi Minh University of Technology – Vietnam National University

Experience

Oct 2021 –
Feb 2023

OLLI Technology Corp.

Vietnam

Jun 2021 –
Sep 2021

OLLI Technology Corp. — Intern

Vietnam

Honors & Awards

  • CMK Foundation Global Scholarship
  • KAIST Scholarship (full tuition and fees)
  • Certificate of Merit — high achievements in academic competitions and scientific research
  • First prize — poster competition, Technical Festival 2021–2022
  • Vallet Scholarships
  • Third prize — Vietnam Mathematical Olympiad (VMO 2018)
  • Silver medal — Mathematical Olympiad 30/04
  • Bronze medal — Mathematical Olympiad 30/04
  • Third prize — Hanoi Open Mathematical Olympiad