Portrait of Khoa Pham-Dinh

Khoa Pham-Dinh

Research Intern, Trustworthy and Adversarial Computing Lab, Aalto University

Helsinki, Finland

About

I am a research intern at the Trustworthy and Adversarial Computing Lab at Aalto University, working on adversarial examples for cyber-physical vision systems: attacks realized in the physical world — printed patches, modified objects, AR/VR — rather than purely digital perturbations. The work is gradient-based optimization of attacks on deep computer vision models under physical constraints.

Before that I spent a year with the Visual AI System Research team at Nokia Technologies and Aalto University, on super-resolution post-filters for Versatile Video Coding, low-rank adaptation for finetuning, and quantization-aware training. My MSc thesis, written at the Signal Analysis and Machine Intelligence group in Tampere, recast joint compression–segmentation training as constrained optimization over the rate–quality–performance trade-off.

Parts of this work have gone into standardization: two contributions to MPEG and JVET, one of which was adopted into the Common Test Conditions used to develop the Video Coding for Machines standard.

News

  • Sep 2026 CASR received the Best Student Paper Award at the IEEE 28th International Workshop on Multimedia Signal Processing (MMSP 2026) in Istanbul.

Publications

Peer-reviewed

  1. CASR: Content-Adaptive Neural Super-Resolution Post-Filter for Versatile Video Coding via Low-Rank Overfitting

    Khoa Pham-Dinh, Francesco Cricri, Maria Santamaria, Honglei Zhang, Hamed Rezazadegan Tavakoli, Moncef Gabbouj, Juho Kannala, Miska M. Hannuksela

    IEEE International Workshop on Multimedia Signal Processing (MMSP), Istanbul, Turkey, 22–24 September 2026.

  2. Evaluating the Emerging MPEG Video Coding for Machines in Semantic Segmentation

    Khoa Pham-Dinh, Farhad Pakdaman, Honglei Zhang, Hamed Rezazadegan Tavakoli, Nam Le, Jukka Ahonen, Moncef Gabbouj

    IEEE International Symposium on Multimedia (ISM), 2025, pp. 141–148. Candidate for Best Paper Award.

  3. Estimating Intra- and Inter-Subject Oxygen Consumption in Outdoor Human Gait Using Multiple Neural Network Approaches

    Philipp Müller†, Khoa Pham-Dinh†, Huy Trinh, Anton Rauhameri, Neil J. Cronin

    PLOS ONE 19(9):e0303317, 2024. † equal contribution.

Preprint

  1. You’ve Seen Enough: Quality-Constrained Image Coding For Machines

    Khoa Pham-Dinh, Sanaz Nami, Hamed Rezazadegan Tavakoli, Moncef Gabbouj, Farhad Pakdaman

Standardization contributions

  • S2.

    Neural Network Super Resolution as Postfilter with Content Adaptation

    Document JVET-AP0178-v1, Joint Video Experts Team, 42nd meeting, April 2026. ITU-T SG21 WP3/21 and ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29.

  • S1.

    Semantic Segmentation for VCM with PandaSet

    Document m67677, ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29/WG 4 (MPEG Video Coding), April 2024. Adopted into the Common Test Conditions used to develop the Video Coding for Machines standard.

Experience

Research Intern

Jul 2026 – present

Trustworthy and Adversarial Computing Lab, Aalto University, Finland

  • Adversarial examples for cyber-physical vision systems: attacks realized in the physical world (printed patches, modified objects, AR/VR) rather than purely digital perturbations.
  • Gradient-based optimization of adversarial attacks on deep computer vision models under physical constraints.

Research Intern

Jul 2025 – Jul 2026

Visual AI System Research team, Nokia Technologies & Aalto University, Finland

  • Super-resolution as post filter for Versatile Video Coding.
  • Low-rank adaptation for model finetuning.
  • Quantization-aware training and mixed-precision quantization for model compression.

Algorithm Engineer

May 2024 – Jun 2025

Nordic Inertial, Finland (part-time)

  • Built machine learning models for zero-velocity detection on IMU sensor data.
  • Implemented sensor-fusion-based headlight leveling control in automotive vehicles.

Research Assistant

Nov 2023 – Feb 2024

Video Coding for Machines project, Nokia Technologies & Tampere University, Finland

  • Defined the semantic-segmentation evaluation methodology for Video Coding for Machines (Detectron2 and Mask2Former as task networks), adopted into the MPEG Common Test Conditions used to develop the standard (S1) and published as publication 2.
  • Evaluated the VCM standard on object detection and tracking using the TVD and SFU-HW datasets.

Research Assistant

May 2023 – Sep 2023

GaitMaven project for gait analysis, Tampere University, Finland

  • Performed sensor fusion across GPS-aided IMU, heart rate and spirometer streams from 16 participants, producing the synchronized dataset used for training.
  • Benchmarked recurrent (RNN, LSTM, GRU), convolutional, ResNet, DenseNet and Xception architectures for oxygen-consumption estimation.

Education

M.Sc., Computing Sciences

Aug 2023 – Dec 2025

Tampere University, Finland

  • Major in Signal Processing & Machine Learning, minor in Applied Mathematics. GPA 5.00/5.
  • Thesis (5/5), at the Signal Analysis and Machine Intelligence (SAMI) group: Optimizing the Rate-Quality-Task Performance in Learned Image Compression for Machine — recast joint compression–segmentation training as constrained optimization over the rate–quality–performance trade-off.

B.Sc., Science and Engineering

Aug 2020 – May 2023

Tampere University, Finland

  • Major in Applied Mathematics, minor in Statistical Data Analysis. GPA 4.61/5.
  • Thesis (5/5): Representation Learning for Candlestick Time-Series Data: A Contrastive Learning Approach.

Teaching

Teaching Assistant, Tampere University

2022 – 2025
  • DATA.ML.300 Computer Vision Spring 2023, Spring 2024, Spring 2025
  • DATA.ML.200 Pattern Recognition & Machine Learning Spring 2023, Spring 2024
  • DATA.ML.100 Introduction to Pattern Recognition & Machine Learning Autumn 2022
  • DATA.DB.100 Database Basics Autumn 2022, Spring 2023
  • COMP.CS.320 Data Intensive Programming Autumn 2022

Awards and honours

  • Best Student Paper Award, IEEE MMSP 2026For CASR, with co-authors · Certificate 2026
  • Academic Excellence Award, Tampere UniversityEUR 7,000 2021, 2023
  • Tuition Fee Scholarship, Tampere UniversityFull waiver for BSc and MSc 2020
  • Third Prize, National Mathematical Olympiad, Vietnam 2020

Technical skills

  • Core Python, PyTorch, C/C++, CUDA, ONNX, OpenCV
  • Data & modelling NumPy, Pandas, scikit-learn, MATLAB, SQL, R
  • Infrastructure Linux/Bash, Slurm, Apptainer, multi-GPU HPC clusters

Languages

  • Vietnamese Native speaker
  • English IELTS 6.5 (05/2026)