About Me

Hoai-Chau Tran

PhD Student · Computer Science · UIUC

Hi! 👋 I am a first-year CS PhD student advised by Fan Lai (UIUC) and Khoa D Doan (VinUniversity). I received my Bachelor's degree from VNU - Ho Chi Minh City University of Science in 2018.

My research lies at the intersection of machine learning and systems, with a focus on:

Efficient Foundation Models Edge AI Generative Models

📧 Email LinkedIn GitHub Scholar 📄 My Resume

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📰 News

2026 Internship

I am joining Apple as a Research Intern for Summer 2026!

2025 NeurIPS

Our work How Many Tokens Do 3D Point Cloud Transformer Architectures Really Need? was accepted at NeurIPS 2025.

2025 PhD

Joined UIUC as a PhD student.

2025 Journal

DetectVul accepted at Future Generation Computer Systems (IF 6.2).

2024 NeurIPS

PiToMe accepted at NeurIPS 2024.

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📚 Publications

NeurIPS ICLM Workshop

How 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).

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.

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).

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🛠️ Service

• 2026: ICML — Reviewer
• 2025: NeurIPS — Volunteer, Reviewer

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📝 Notes

You’ll also find my notes here — continuously evolving as I learn and explore new ideas across math, ML, and systems.

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