Dr. Thao Minh Le

Assistant Professor of Artificial Intelligence

I am currently a tenure-track Assistant Professor of AI at the Pennsylvania State University, Great Valley, USA. I am also a member of the faculty of the Graduate School, Pennsylvania State University. Previously, I worked at the Applied AI Institute, Deakin University, Australia (2021-2025), Yahoo! Japan Research (2017-2018) and Samsung Vietnam Mobile R&D Center (2014-2016). I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from Deakin University (2021). My research contributions and academic excellence have been recognized with multiple awards.

Email: thaoyd2@gmail.com

Research Interests

My research interests focus on deep learning and machine learning techniques for visual perception, and vision and language reasoning. These capabilities are the key elements required of the next generation of virtual assistant systems. Real-world applications of these systems include security and safety services, healthcare.

Latest News

Nov 11, 2025
Our paper Rethinking Deep Alignment Through The Lens Of Incomplete Safety Learning is accepted for presentation at the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence 2026 (AAAI-26).
Oct 14, 2025
My proposal titled Fine-Grained Human Motion Understanding for Early Detection of Neurological Movement Disorders has been accepted for funding by Penn State University for 2025-2026. Looking forward to working with collaborators and students on this project.
Oct 14, 2025
Our paper Confident and Trustworthy Model for Fidgety Movement Classification is accepted for publication in the EEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics, 2025.
Aug 18, 2025
I joined The Pennsylvania State University, Great Valley, Pennsylvania, USA as a tenure-track Assistant Professor of AI from August 2025. I am also a member of the faculty of the Graduate School. I am looking forward to working with my new colleagues and students.
Jul 11, 2025
Our paper Planner-Refiner: Dynamic Space-Time Refinement for Vision-Language Alignment in Videos is accepted for presentation at the European Conference on Artificial Intelligence 2025.
Jul 11, 2025
Our paper Towards Agentic AI for Multimodal-Guided Video Object Segmentation is accepted for presentation at the Instance-Level Recognition and Generation Workshop, ICCV, 2025.
Dec 24, 2024
Our paper amVAE: Age-aware Multimorbidity clustering using Variational AutoEncoders is accepted for publication in Computers in Biology and Medicine (CIBM).
Dec 10, 2024
Our paper Progressive Multi-granular Alignments for Grounded Reasoning in Large Vision-Language Models is accepted for presentation at the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence 2025.
Nov 4, 2024
I have been awarded a 3-year research support, starting from April 2025, for my research proposal on "Fine-grained Human Motion Understanding and Its Applications" by Deakin University as part of Deakin University Postdoctoral Research Fellowship 2025.
Oct 5-13, 2024
I gave a talk at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and Fraunhofer Research Institution, Germany on Vision Language Intelligence: Machines That Reason About What They See. I am super excited with my upcoming research collaboration with Fraunhofer on AI for surgical education and training and leveraging its capabilities to enhance patient safety.
Sep 2, 2024
I will be visiting Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and Fraunhofer Research Institution for Individualized and Cell-Based Medical Engineering IMTE in early October as part of my DAAD Postdoc-NeT-AI Fellowship.
Aug 9, 2024
Our preliminary work on Promptable Iterative Visual Refinement for Video Instance Segmentation is accepted for presentation at Instance-Level Recognition Workshop at ECCV 2024.
Jul 25, 2024
Our paper Unified Compositional Query Machine with Multimodal Consistency for Video-based Human Activity Recognition is accepted for presentation at British Machine Vision Conference 2024.
Apr 3, 2024
I have been selected as a DAAD Alnet fellow for the Postdoctoral Networking Tour in AI 04/2024. I will be participating in a virtual networking week (15/4-19/4/2024) and later receiving the DAAD's financial and origanizational support to visit German institutions in person to learn about the German AI research community. Please say "Hi" if you are also attending!
Dec 1, 2023
My grant application on video analysis for early detection of Cerebral Palsy has been successful. I will serve as the Lead Chief Investigator for the two-year project with the Cerebral Palsy Alliance Research Foundation.

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