Dung Nguyen


2026

This paper presents the design and construction of WikiFirst, a corpus for investigating the impact of content variation on authorship similarity under a fixed genre. Prior work has investigated individual authorial style and impact of genre. However, the role of content has remained underexplored due to the lack of suitable data. We address this gap by constructing a Wikipedia-based corpus consisting exclusively of first revisions authored by non-anonymous editors, thereby ensuring high authorship certainty while maintaining a stable encyclopaedic genre.
Large language models require continuous adaptation to new tasks while preserving safety alignment. However, fine-tuning on even benign data often compromises safety behaviors. We investigate which training samples cause alignment drift through a data-centric lens. Our experiments show samples contribute unequally: high-gradient samples cause greater safety degradation and drive models toward pretrained distributions, while moderate-gradient samples enable task learning with minimal alignment loss. This connects to the elasticity phenomenon—high-gradient samples activate the reversion force pulling models toward pretrained behavior. We propose gradient-based sample selection that filters high-gradient samples during fine-tuning. Across multiple model families on continual domain tasks, our method substantially improves alignment preservation while maintaining competitive task performance, without requiring curated safe data or architectural modifications.

2023

We present The Vault, an open-source dataset of high quality code-text pairs in multiple programming languages for training large language models to understand and generate code. We propose methods for thoroughly extracting samples that use both rules and deep learning to ensure that they contain high-quality pairs of code and text, resulting in a dataset of 43 million high-quality code-text pairs. We thoroughly evaluated this dataset and discovered that when used to train common code language models (such as CodeT5, CodeBERT, and CodeGen), it outperforms the same models train on other datasets such as CodeSearchNet. These evaluations included common coding tasks such as code generation, code summarization, and code search. The Vault can be used by researchers and practitioners to train a wide range of big language models that understand code. Alternatively, researchers can use our data cleaning methods and scripts to improve their own datasets. We anticipate that using The Vault to train large language models will improve their ability to understand and generate code, propelling AI research and software development forward. We are releasing our source code and a framework to make it easier for others to replicate our results.

2011