Home

Toan Doan

I do research. I build things.

I’m Toan, a PhD student at the Applied Artificial Intelligence Initiative (A2I2) at Deakin University, supervised by Prof. Sunil Gupta and Dr. Thin Nguyen. Previously, I worked with Prof. Bac Le at the University of Science - VNUHCM.

There is a Vietnamese expression I like: tay to —1 someone who is deeply hands-on and technically capable. That captures how I tend to work. I enjoy digging into technical problems, understanding how things work, and trying to make them work in practice.

For me, tay to means figuring things out and making them work.

  1. Yes, this em dash — and the others on this website — is intentional. ↩︎

News

  • Sep 2026 My second paper from my PhD work was accepted to NeurIPS 2026!
  • Jul 2026 I successfully completed my candidature confirmation and received positive feedback from the committee!
  • May 2026 My first paper from my PhD work was accepted to KDD 2026!
  • Jan 2026 Two papers were accepted to EACL 2026! One is my first first-author paper, and the other is a collaboration with my labmates.
  • Oct 2025 I started my PhD at A2I2!

Publications

2026

  1. StiCAS: Compositional Activation Steering via Stiefel Manifold Coordinate Transport
    NeurIPS 2026Poster
    Toan Doan, Thin Nguyen, Sunil Gupta
    Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS)
  2. A Geometric Information Bottleneck for Activation Steering
    KDD 2026Poster
    Toan Doan, Thin Nguyen, Sunil Gupta
    ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD) paper code
  3. Causal Activation Steering via Sparse Mediation
    EACL 2026Findings
    Toan Doan, Uyen Le, Thin Nguyen
    Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL) paper code
  4. Causal Direct Preference Optimization for Language Model Alignment
    EACL 2026Findings
    Uyen Le, Thin Nguyen, Toan Nguyen, Toan Doan, Trung Le, Bac Le
    Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL) paper

2024

  1. Curriculum Meta-Learning for Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer
    KBS 2024Journal
    Toan Doan, Bac Le
    Knowledge-Based Systems paper

Elsewhere