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Yunsung Lee

AI/ML Research Engineer

Contact Information

Professional Summary

AI/ML research engineer with strong research foundations (10+ publications in top-tier conferences, nearly 2,000 citations) and practical experience deploying commercial AI products (over 5M+ MAUs). Currently leading research initiatives at MaumAI's WoRV team, specializing in Embodied AI, autonomous agents, and robotics foundation models, while also serving as an Adjunct Professor at DGIST (School of Undergraduate Studies), teaching undergraduate coursework in Physical AI. Expertise spans multimodal AI, autonomous systems, and translating research into deployed products.

Skills & Expertise

Research Areas: Vision-Language Multimodal AI, Diffusion Models, Autonomous Agents, Robotics Foundation Models

Technical Skills: Python, PyTorch, Git, Docker, FastAPI, Elasticsearch, ML Model Deployment

Leadership: Research Team Management, Cross-functional Collaboration, Technical Mentoring

Professional Experience

Alternative Military Service

Positions at Wrtn Technologies and Riiid served as Alternative Military Service (Technical Research Personnel, 전문연구요원) until April 14, 2025, combining mandatory service with R&D in strategic industries.

Head of Research, WoRV Team MaumAI · Seongnam, South Korea · May 2025 - Present

Leading research initiatives for WoRV (World Model for Robotics and Vehicle Control), MaumAI's flagship Embodied AI research organization. Overseeing the development of foundation models that integrate language, vision, and action for robotics and autonomous driving applications.

Adjunct Professor, School of Undergraduate Studies DGIST (Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology) · Daegu, South Korea · Aug. 2026 - Present

Teaching undergraduate coursework in Physical AI.

AI Engineer Wrtn Technologies · Seoul, South Korea · Oct. 2023 - Apr. 2025

Specialized in memory and personalization for autonomous agents and in multimodal capabilities for wrtn. Led core development efforts ranging from ML research and implementation to backend engineering, and delivered the product's key agent features.

Research Scientist Riiid · Seoul, South Korea · Apr. 2022 - Oct. 2023

Conducted computer vision research for educational AI, building math problem image retrieval for AI:R Math. Developed English vocabulary visualizations using text-to-image diffusion models (Santa).

ML Research Scientist Scatter Lab · Seoul, South Korea · Jul. 2021 - Mar. 2022

Researched a vision-and-language multimodal dialogue system for the chatbot "Luda Lee." (Ref: Make Luda See, Naver Deview 2023.)

OCR Team Intern CLOVA, NAVER Corp · Seongnam, South Korea · Sep. 2020 - Mar. 2021

Researched self-supervised representation learning, domain generalization, and data augmentations for document images.

ML Team Intern HYPERCONNECT · Seoul, South Korea · Jul. 2020 - Aug. 2020

Researched adversarially robust semi-supervised learning.

Intern Algorithm Labs · Seoul, South Korea · Dec. 2016 - Feb. 2017

Developed software and produced algorithm education content.

Education

M.Sc. Computer Science Korea University · Seoul, South Korea · Mar. 2019 - Feb. 2022 Advisors: Seungryong Kim, Jaegul Choo

Visiting Scholar Carnegie Mellon University · PA, USA · Jan. 2020 - Jul. 2020 Artificial Intelligence, Language Technologies Institute. Sponsored by IITP under the South Korean government.

B.Sc. Computer Science Hanyang University · Seoul, South Korea · Mar. 2014 - Feb. 2019

Publications

Research Impact

These publications have accumulated over 1,993 citations on Google Scholar.

Publication Notes

* denotes equal contribution (co-first authors). † denotes co-corresponding authorship.

2026

  • Yunsung Lee, Hyeongmin Lee, "Not All Prediction Targets Keep Training-Free Diffusion Guidance on the Manifold," European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV'26), 2026.

  • Haebin Seong*, Sungmin Kim*, Yongjun Cho*, ..., Youngjae Yu†, Yunsung Lee†, "CostNav: A Navigation Benchmark for Real-World Economic-Cost Evaluation of Physical AI Agents," The First Workshop on Scalable Robot Learning Systems at CVPR 2026 (ScaleBot @ CVPR'26), 2026. [arXiv]

    Show all 23 authors

    Haebin Seong*, Sungmin Kim*, Yongjun Cho*, Myunchul Joe, Geunwoo Kim, Yubeen Park, Sunhoo Kim, Yoonshik Kim, Suhwan Choi, Jaeyoon Jung, Jiyong Youn, Jinmyung Kwak, Sunghee Ahn, Jaemin Lee, Younggil Do, Seungyeop Yi, Woojin Cheong, Minhyeok Oh, Minchan Kim, Seongjae Kang, Samwoo Seong, Youngjae Yu†, Yunsung Lee†

  • Jisu Nam, Yicong Hong, Chun-Hao Huang, Feng Liu, JoungBin Lee, Jiyoung Kim, Siyoon Jin, Yunsung Lee, Jaeyoon Jung, Suhwan Choi, Seungryong Kim†, Yang Zhou†, "WorldCam: Interactive Autoregressive 3D Gaming Worlds with Camera Pose as a Unifying Geometric Representation," The CVPR 2026 Workshop on Video World Models (VideoWorldModel @ CVPR'26), 2026. [arXiv]

  • Suhwan Choi, Yunsung Lee, Yubeen Park, Chris Dongjoo Kim, Ranjay Krishna, Dieter Fox, Youngjae Yu, "vla-eval: A Unified Evaluation Harness for Vision-Language-Action Models," The ICRA 2026 Workshop on From Data to Decisions (From Data to Decisions @ ICRA'26), 2026. [arXiv]

  • Suhwan Choi*, Jaeyoon Jung*, Haebin Seong*, Minchan Kim, Minyeong Kim, Yongjun Cho, Yoonshik Kim, Yubeen Park, Youngjae Yu†, Yunsung Lee†, "D2E: Scaling Vision-Action Pretraining on Desktop Data for Transfer to Embodied AI," The International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR'26), 2026. Project Code

2025

  • Yohan Lee*, Sungho Park*, Sangwoo Han*, Yunsung Lee*†, Yongwoo Song, Adam Lee, Jiwung Hyun, Jaemin Kim, Seungtaek Choi, HyeJin Gong†, "SAFARI: Sample-specific Assessment Framework for AI in Real-world Interactions," Findings of the Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Findings of NAACL'25), 2025 (Accepted, but withdrawn due to corporate policy)

  • Jin-Young Kim*, Soonwoo Kwon*, Hyojun Go*, Yunsung Lee, and Seungtaek Choi, "ScoreCL: Augmentation-Adaptive Contrastive Learning via Score-Matching Function," Machine Learning (Springer Journal), 2025

2024

  • Yunsung Lee*, Jin-Young Kim*, Hyojun Go*, Myeongho Jeong, Shinhyeok Oh, and Seungtaek Choi, "Multi-Architecture Multi-Expert Diffusion Models," Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI'24), 2024

2023

  • Hyojun Go*, Jin-Young Kim*, Yunsung Lee*, Seunghyun Lee, Shinhyeok Oh, Hyeongdon Moon, and Seungtaek Choi, "Addressing Negative Transfer in Diffusion Models," Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS'23), 2023

  • Shinhyeok Oh*, Hyojun Go*, Hyeongdon Moon, Yunsung Lee, Myeongho Jeong, Hyun Seung Lee, and Seungtaek Choi, "Evaluation of Question Generation Needs More References," Findings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Findings of ACL'23), 2023

  • Hyun Seung Lee*, Seungtaek Choi*, Yunsung Lee, Hyeongdon Moon, Shinhyeok Oh, Myeongho Jeong, Hyojun Go, and Christian Wallraven, "Cross Encoding as Augmentation: Towards Effective Educational Text Classification," Findings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Findings of ACL'23), 2023

  • Hyojun Go*, Yunsung Lee*, Jin-Young Kim*, Seunghyun Lee, Myeongho Jeong, Hyun Seung Lee, and Seungtaek Choi, "Towards Practical Plug-and-Play Diffusion Models," The IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2023 (CVPR'23), 2023

2022

  • Yunsung Lee*, Gyuseong Lee*, Kwangrok Ryoo*, Hyojun Go*, Jihye Park*, Seungryong Kim, "Towards Flexible Inductive Bias via Progressive Reparameterization Scheduling," ECCV 2022 Visual Inductive Priors for Data-Efficient Deep Learning Workshop (ECCVW'22), 2022

2021

  • Seokju Cho*, Sunghwan Hong*, Sangryul Jeon, Yunsung Lee, Kwanghoon Sohn, and Seungryong Kim, "CATs: Cost Aggregation Transformers for Visual Correspondence," Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS'21), 2021

  • Junbum Cha, Hancheol Cho, Kyungjae Lee, Seunghyun Park, Yunsung Lee, and Sungrae Park. "SWAD: Domain Generalization by Seeking Flat Minima," Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS'21), 2021

  • Yunsung Lee, Teakgyu Hong, Han-Cheol Cho, Junbum Cha, and Seungryong Kim. "HoughCL: Finding Better Positive Pairs in Dense Self-supervised Learning," ICML 2021 Workshop: Self-Supervised Learning for Reasoning and Perception (ICMLW'21), 2021

  • Yunsung Lee, Teakgyu Hong, and Seungryong Kim. "Data Augmentations for Document Images," The AAAI-21 Workshop on Scientific Document Understanding (AAAIW'21), 2021

2020

  • Seokeon Choi, Junhyun Lee, Yunsung Lee, and Alexander Hauptmann. "Robust Long-Term Object Tracking via Improved Discriminative Model Prediction," The ECCV-20 Workshop on Visual Object Tracking Challenge (ECCVW'20), 2020

  • Junsoo Lee*, Eungyeup Kim*, Yunsung Lee, Dongjun Kim, Jaehyuk Chang, and Jaegul Choo, "Reference-Based Sketch Image Colorization using Augmented-Self Reference and Dense Semantic Correspondence," IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR'20), 2020

2019

  • Sookyung Kim*, Sunghyun Park*, Sunghyo Chung*, Joonseok Lee, Yunsung Lee, Hyojin Kim, Mr Prabhat, and Jaegul Choo, "Learning to Focus and Track Extreme Climate Events," British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC'19), 2019. Accepted as Spotlight Presentation (6.9% acceptance rate for spotlight papers).

Honors & Awards

Service Awards

  • ICML 2026 Gold Reviewer — Recognized among the top reviewers based on area-chair ratings of submitted reviews; awarded complimentary registration, 2026

Competition Awards

  • 5th place, RLT-DiMP team, VOT-Long-Term, ECCVW Visual Object Tracking Challenge, 2020
  • 4th place, HYU Programming Contest (Advanced Division), Seoul, Korea, 2015
  • Dean's citation for ACM-ICPC Daejeon Regional, Hanyang University, Seoul, Korea, 2014

Other Activities

Invited Talks & Panels

Korean Conference on Computer Vision (KCCV 2026), Busan, South Korea

Invited Mentor | Aug. 2026

  • Mentoring session "Work & Life." [program]

Hankuk University of Foreign Studies (HUFS), Division of Language & AI

Invited Speaker | May 2026

  • "Robotics Foundation Models: Trajectories and open problems." Multimodal AI course. [slides]

State University of New York (SUNY) Korea

Invited Speaker | Apr. 2026

  • Invited talk for STEM undergraduate students.

Judging

Hack@thon

Judge | Nov. 2025

  • Served as a judge for the Hack@thon sponsored by Lovable at Sogang University. link

Conference Reviewer

Top-tier ML/CV Conferences:

  • The IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) (2023 - )
  • The IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) (2023 - )
  • Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) (2024 - )
  • European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) (2024 - )
  • The International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) (2024 - )
  • The International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) (2026 - ) — Gold Reviewer Award, 2026
  • ACL Rolling Review for ACL, EMNLP (2024 - )

Selected Open-source Contributions

Open-World Agents

Core contributing member of the open-world-agents organization, which builds tools for open-world agent R&D. Contributions include open-world-agents and desktop-env, a real-time, high-frequency, real-world desktop environment for desktop-based ML development (agents, world models, etc.).

Mem0

Contributor to mem0, a memory layer for AI apps.

Awesome Vision Transformers

Creator of awesome-visual-representation-learning-with-transformers, a curated "awesome list" (200+ stars) started in 2021, when Vision Transformer research was just taking off.

Professional Organizations & Activities

PR12, TensorFlow Korea

Member | Jun. 2020 - Present

Active member of TensorFlow Korea, Korea's largest machine learning research community, participating in an advanced study group on recent ML research.

TEDxHanyangU

Organizer | Sep. 2017 - Jun. 2018

  • Experience Catalyst, 2018
  • Web Engineer, 2017

SW Maestro, Ministry of Science and ICT

Trainee | Aug. 2017 - Jan. 2018

Government-run software talent development program under Korea's Ministry of Science and ICT. Completed a CPA document automation project and learned the fundamentals of computer vision and machine learning, which prompted the decision to pursue graduate study.

ALOHA (Algorithm research team of Hanyang University)

Team Leader | Nov. 2015 - Oct. 2016

  • Taught algorithms to team members. Hosted several programming contests.
  • Test writer & presenter, The First KSH (Korea, Sookmyung W, Hanyang Univ.) Algorithm Camp.
  • Chief test writer, HYU Programming Contest.

Home Bartender

Licensed Bartender

Certified under Korea's national Craftsman Bartender license — a hobby that rewards both precision and improvisation.

Contact

For more information or collaboration opportunities, feel free to reach out through any of the contact methods listed above.