About Me

Hi! I’m a 3rd year PhD candidate in Computer Science at NYU Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, working on explainable machine learning and evaluating AI agents, advised by Professor Rajesh Ranganath.

I graduated from Yale University with a MS in Computer Science and a BS in Computer Science and Applied Mathematics. As an undergraduate student, I had the pleasure to work with Professor Smita Krishnaswamy and Professor David van Dijk on projects investigating the use of graph neural networks on analyzing sequencing data.

Publications

• What LLMs explain is not what they believe: Evaluating explanation sufficiency under models’ own input beliefs. International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2026. Work by Nhi Nguyen*, Shauli Ravfogel, Rajesh Ranganath

• FIMP: Foundation Model-Informed Message Passing for Graph Neural Networks. Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR), 2026. Work by Syed Rizvi*, Nazreen Pallikkavaliyaveetil*, David Zhang, Zhuoyang Lyu, Nhi Nguyen, Harry Lyu, Benjamin Christensen, Josue Caro, Antonio Fonseca, Emanuele Zappala, Maryam Bagherian, Christopher Averill, Chadi Abdallah, Amin Karbasi, Rex Ying, Maria Brbic, Rahul Dhodapkar, David van Dijk

• Explanations that reveal all through the definition of encoding. Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2024. Work by Aahlad Puli*, Nhi Nguyen*, Rajesh Ranaganth

Workshops

• Do LLMs Lie About What They Use? Benchmark for Metacognitive Truthfulness in Large Language Models. Actionable Interpretability Workshop at ICML, 2025. Work by Nhi Nguyen*, Shauli Ravfogel, Rajesh Ranaganth

• A Flow Artist for High-Dimensional Cellular Data. International Workshop on Machine Learning for Signal Processing (MLSP), 2023. Work by Kincaid MacDonald*, Dhananjay Bhaskar*,Guy Thampakkul, Nhi Nguyen, Joia Zhang, Michael Perlmutter, Ian Adelstein, Smita Krishnaswamy

Preprints

• Black Box Causal Inference: Effect Estimation via Meta Prediction. Preprint. Work by Lucius EJ Bynum*, Aahlad Manas Puli*, Diego Herrero-Quevedo*, Nhi Nguyen*, Carlos Fernandez-Granda, Kyunghyun Cho, Rajesh Ranganath

Education

• New York University, New York, NY. PhD Candidate in Computer Science. Aug 2023 – Present

• Yale University, New Haven, CT. Master of Science in Computer Science. Bachelor of Science in Computer Science (Honors) and Applied Mathematics (Honors). Summa Cum Laude. Aug 2019 – May 2023

Honors & Awards

• Gold Reviewer Award at ICML, 2026
• DeepMind Scholarship, 2023.
• MacCracken Doctoral Fellowship at NYU, 2023.
• Russell Henry Chittenden Prize, 2023.
• Phi Beta Kappa, 2022.