Tan Dat Nguyen — PhD Student at KAIST

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. [Academic CV]

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@mmai.io.

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

Dec 2025 Two papers accepted at ICASSP 2026
Dec 2024 Three papers accepted at ICASSP 2025
Nov 2023 One paper accepted at ICASSP 2024

Publications

12 papers

7 first-authored

ICASSP ×6 Under Review ×2 Preprint ×1

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

2026

Under Review [S.2]

WAND: Windowed Attention and Knowledge Distillation for Efficient Autoregressive Text-to-Speech Models

Hanna Lee, Tan Dat Nguyen, Jaehoon Kang, Kyuhong Shim

arXiv

Under Review [S.1]

MamTra: A Hybrid Mamba-Transformer Backbone for Speech Synthesis

Tan Dat Nguyen, Sangmin Bae, Joon Son Chung, Ji-Hoon Kim

Project arXiv Code

ICASSP 2026 Oral [C.9]

SPADE: Structured Pruning and Adaptive Distillation for Efficient LLM-TTS

Tan Dat Nguyen, Jaehun Kim, Ji-Hoon Kim, Shukjae Choi, Youshin Lim, Joon Son Chung

Demo arXiv

ICASSP 2026 [C.8]

MAGE: A Coarse-to-Fine Speech Enhancer with Masked Generative Model

The Hieu Pham*, Tan Dat Nguyen*, Phuong Thanh Tran, Joon Son Chung, Duc Dung Nguyen

Demo arXiv

2025

ICASSP 2025 [C.7]

Accelerating Codec-based Speech Synthesis with Multi-Token Prediction and Speculative Decoding

Tan Dat Nguyen, Ji-Hoon Kim, Jeongsoo Choi, Shukjae Choi, Jinseok Park, Younglo Lee, Joon Son Chung

Demo arXiv

ICASSP 2025 [C.6]

AdaptVC: High Quality Voice Conversion with Adaptive Learning

Jaehun Kim, Ji-Hoon Kim, Yeunju Choi, Tan Dat Nguyen, Seongkyu Mun, Joon Son Chung

Demo arXiv

ICASSP 2025 [C.5]

VoiceDiT: Dual-Condition Diffusion Transformer for Environment-Aware Speech Synthesis

Jaemin Jung*, Junseok Ahn*, Chaeyoung Jung, Tan Dat Nguyen, Youngjoon Jang, Joon Son Chung

Demo arXiv

2024

ICASSP 2024 Oral [C.4]

FreGrad: Lightweight and Fast Frequency-Aware Diffusion Vocoder

Tan Dat Nguyen*, Ji-Hoon Kim*, Youngjoon Jang, Jaehun Kim, Joon Son Chung

Demo arXiv Code

Preprint 2024 [A.1]

Wanna Hear Your Voice: Adaptive, Effective, and Language-Agnostic Approach in Voice Extraction

The Hieu Pham, Nguyen Tan Dat, Phuong Thanh Tran, Duc Dung Nguyen

Demo arXiv

2022

FICC 2022 [C.1]

Instance-Based Transfer Learning Approach for Vietnamese Speech Synthesis with Very Low Resource

Tuong Q. Lam, Dung D. Nguyen, Dat T. Nguyen, Han K. Lam, Thuc H. Cai, Suong N. Hoang, Hao D. Do

Paper

2021

ICABDE 2021 Oral [C.2]

Calib-StyleSpeech: A Zero-shot Approach in Voice Cloning of High Adaptive Text To Speech System with Imbalanced Dataset

Nguyen Tan Dat, Lam Quang Tuong, Nguyen Duc Dung

Demo Paper

NAFOSTED 2021 Oral [C.3]

A Linguistic-based Transfer Learning Approach for Low-resource Bahnar Text-to-Speech

Tan Dat Nguyen, Quang Tuong Lam, Duc Hao Do, Huu Thuc Cai, Hoang Suong Nguyen, Thanh Hung Vo, Duc Dung Nguyen

Demo Paper

Selected Projects

FreGrad —

Lightweight Diffusion Vocoder

kaistmm/fregrad

SPADE

Structured Pruning for LLM-TTS

MamTra

Hybrid Mamba-Transformer TTS

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

Aug 2015 –
Aug 2018

Nguyen Chi Thanh High School for Gifted

Dak Nong, Vietnam

Experience

Oct 2021 –
Feb 2023

OLLI Technology Corp.

Vietnam

Jun 2021 –
Sep 2021

OLLI Technology Corp. — Intern

Vietnam

Honors & Awards

2025 CMK Foundation Global Scholarship
2023 KAIST Scholarship (full tuition and fees)
2022 Certificate of Merit — high achievements in academic competitions and scientific research
2022 First prize — poster competition, Technical Festival 2021–2022
2018 Vallet Scholarships
2018 Third prize — Vietnam Mathematical Olympiad (VMO 2018)
2017 Silver medal — Mathematical Olympiad 30/04
2016 Bronze medal — Mathematical Olympiad 30/04
2016 Third prize — Hanoi Open Mathematical Olympiad