NVIDIA
“Standing on the shoulders of giants.” — Isaac Newton
Research Interest
Building efficient, high-performing Vision-Language Models (VLMs), with focus on:
- Distillation
- RL
- Agent
- Pruning
Collaboration Requests & Job Applications
If your research interests align with mine and you already have a draft idea to discuss and develop together, feel free to reach out for collaboration. For university collaboration, alignment is the primary criterion. We are also actively looking for talented internship and full-time candidates. Preferred qualifications are strong first author publications at top-tier main-track conferences (not workshops) and deep expertise in one area; co-first author papers are discouraged for now. In my view, a strong profile means five-to-ten first author papers at top-tier venues (CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, ACL, EMNLP) in focused one area from deep expertise. I wouldn't consider other conferences and journals since I am not familiar with the others. If you meet these criteria, click "Open Gmail" to open a pre-filled draft, attach your resume, and send. Please keep it as a brief cold email.
NVIDIA Research Intern Application
NVIDIA Research Full-time Application
Work Experience
NVIDIA
Research Scientist
Oct. 2025 — Current
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LEAD
ZPPO: Zone of Proximal Policy Optimization
[Completed]
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RL post-training that keeps the teacher inside the prompt rather than the policy gradient, using BCQ/NCQ question reformulations and a prompt replay buffer to lift small students on hard questions without policy drift.
Under Review U.S. Provisional Patent Filed 2026
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LEAD
AXPO: Agent eXplorative Policy Optimization
[Completed]
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Agentic RL training that recovers tool usage through tool-call resampling, improving multimodal reasoning performance against larger baselines.
Under Review U.S. Provisional Patent Filed 2026 Internal Tech Transfer
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LEAD
Masking Teacher and Reinforcing Student
[Completed]
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Mask-progressive RL distillation that gradually unmasks teacher weights and uses offline RL with accuracy & distillation rewards.
CVPR 2026 Accept U.S. Non-Provisional Patent Filed 2026
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LEAD
Unified RL & Imitation Learning for VLMs
[Completed]
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Combines RL with adversarial imitation, using an LLM-based discriminator and multi-teacher guidance to build lightweight yet powerful VLMs.
NeurIPS 2025 Accept U.S. Patent Upgraded to Non-Provisional 2025
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LEAD
GenRecal
[Completed]
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Cross-architecture VLM distillation via a Recalibrator that aligns heterogeneous token representations regardless of vocabulary, token splits, or index ordering.
ECCV 2026 Accept U.S. Patent Upgraded to Non-Provisional 2025 Internal Tech Transfer
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LEAD
VLsI: Verbalized Layers-to-Interactions
[Completed]
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Hardened the verbalizer-based layer-wise distillation into a production-ready recipe and led its internal tech transfer into NVIDIA's VLM development pipeline.
CVPR 2025 Accept U.S. Patent Upgraded to Non-Provisional 2025 Internal Tech Transfer
NVIDIA
Research Intern
Oct. 2024 — Oct. 2025
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LEAD
Unified RL & Imitation Learning for VLMs
[Initiated]
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First formulation of the RL + adversarial imitation training pipeline; initial experiments and team setup.
U.S. Provisional Patent Filed 2025
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LEAD
GenRecal
[Initiated]
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Initial design of the Recalibrator framework for cross-tokenizer VLM distillation; first proof-of-concept and internal demo.
U.S. Provisional Patent Filed 2025
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LEAD
VLsI: Verbalized Layers-to-Interactions
[Initiated]
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Layer-wise distillation using intermediate verbalizers, enabling small VLMs (2B/7B) to align with large VLMs' reasoning progression and outperform GPT-4V.
CVPR 2025 Accept U.S. Provisional Patent Filed 2025
Education
KAIST
Mar. 2020 — Aug. 2025
Ph.D., School of Electrical Engineering GPA 3.77 / 4.3
Dissertation: Building High-performing, Efficient-size Vision Language Models: Merge, Modify, and Distill
[Link]
[Degree Certificate]
KAIST
Mar. 2018 — Feb. 2020
M.S., The Cho Chun Sik Graduate School of Green Transportation GPA 3.72 / 4.3
Thesis: Training Encoder-Attention through Fully-Connected CRFs for Efficient End-to-End Lane Detection Model
[Link]
[Degree Certificate]
Hanyang University
Mar. 2014 — Feb. 2018
B.S., Mathematics and Electronic Engineering GPA 3.86 / 4.5
Thesis: Learning Rank of Evaluated Songs for Classifying Unknown Music by Convolutional Neural Network
[Link]
[Degree Certificate]
Publications
| Overall | 18 Accepts · 4 Pending · 2 Tech Reports |
| CV | 5 CVPR · 2 ICCV · 3 ECCV · 1 ICIP |
| ML | 3 NeurIPS · 1 ICLR |
| NLP | 1 ACL · 1 EMNLP |
| Journal | 1 Pattern Recognition |
Publication Profile
79%
21%
- First & Lead Author 19 / 24 = 79%
- Co-Author 5 / 24 = 21%
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Masking Teacher and Reinforcing Student for Distilling Vision-Language ModelsIEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2026 [Paper]U.S. Patent Application Filed (Non-Provisional), NVIDIA Research, 2026 -
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Reviewer Experience
Journal
- IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI)
- IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems (TNNLS)
- IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology (TCSVT)
Conference
- IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)
- IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)
- European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV)
- International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)
- Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS)
- International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML)
- AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)
- Association for Computational Linguistic (ACL)
- Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
Invited Talks & Awards
- Silver Reviewer Award, International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML)2026
- Best Runner-Up Award (Oral, Top 1%), Multi-Turn Interactions in LLMs Workshop @ NeurIPS2025
- Invited Talk at Kongju University2025
- Invited Talk at Hanyang University ERICA2025
- Invited Talk at Kookmin University2025
- Invited Talk at Dongseo University2025
- 31st Samsung HumanTech Paper Awards in Computer Science & Engineering2025
- KCC XAI Workshop, Best Paper Awards2024
- Invited Talk at Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information (KISTI)2024
- Invited Talk at NAVER HyperCLOVA X2024
- Invited Talk at Kakao Brain2024
- 1st Award for Research Presentation, Center for Applied Research in AI (CARAI)2023
- GIRE Research Mentor, Seoul International School — "MUsE", Journal of Student Research [Publication]2023
- KAIST SW IT Academy, AI Project Director of 1st Award Topic2023
- Invitation to Presenter in Korean Conference on Computer Vision (KCCV)2023
- KAIST SW IT Academy, Lecturer of Data Structure & Algorithm, Deep Learning, Computer Vision2023
- Invitation to Presenter in Korean Conference on Computer Vision (KCCV)2022
- 2nd Award for Research Presentation, Center for Applied Research in AI (CARAI)2022
- KAIST FellowshipMar. 2020 — Feb. 2024
- National Government FellowshipMar. 2018 — Feb. 2020
- 1st President's Award for International Autonomous Vehicle Competition, Team Leader [YouTube][Talk]2018
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