About Me

Hi 👋 ! I am Hoai-Chau Tran, a first-year PhD student in Computer Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). I am advised by professor Heng Ji (UIUC) and professor Khoa D Doan (VinUniversity). Before that, I received my Bachelor degree from VNU - Ho Chi Minh City University of Science in 2018.

My (current) research focuses on the intersection of machine learning and engineering, with particular emphasis on efficient foundation models (SAM, LLMs, ,etc), EdgeAI and AutoML.

📰 News

2025: 📄 Our work How Many Tokens Do 3D Point Cloud Transformer Architectures Really Need? was accepted at NeurIPS 2025 .
2025: 🎓 Joined UIUC as a graduate student.
2025: 📄 Our work “A statement-level code vulnerability detection for Python”: DetectVul was accepted at the Future Generation Computer Systems Journal (IF 6.2).
2024: 📄 Our paper PiToMe was accepted to NeurIPS 2024.

📚 Publications

2025: NeurIPS ICLM WorkshopHow Many Tokens Do 3D Point Cloud Transformer Architectures Really Need?. Tuan Anh Tran, Duy Minh Ho Nguyen, Hoai-Chau Tran*, Michael Barz, Khoa D Doan, Roger Wattenhofer, Vien Anh Ngo, Mathias Niepert, Daniel Sonntag, & Paul Swoboda (2025).

2025: Journal Article DetectVul: A statement-level code vulnerability detection for Python.. Hoai-Chau Tran*, Anh-Duy Tran, & Kim-Hung Le (2025). Future Generation Computer Systems, 163, 107504.

2024: NeurIPS ICLR Workshop Accelerating Transformers with Spectrum-Preserving Token Merging. Hoai-Chau Tran*, Duy Minh Ho Nguyen, Manh-Duy Nguyen, TrungTin Nguyen, Ngan Hoang Le, Pengtao Xie, Daniel Sonntag, James Zou, Binh T. Nguyen, & Mathias Niepert (2024).