Byoungjip Kim (Byoung Kim, 김병집)

"Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value."   -- Albert Einstein

Recent Research Topics

• Large Language Models (LLMs), Code LLMs, LLM Agents, LLM Alignment

• Reinforcement Learning (RL)

• Self-Supervised Learning (SSL)

• Generative Models (GANs, VAEs, Diffusion Models)

Education

• 2004.03 ~ 2013.02: Ph.D. in Computer Science at KAIST (Advisor: Prof. Junehwa Song)

• 2002.03 ~ 2004.02: M.S. in Electrical and Electronic Engineering at KAIST (Advisor: Prof. Daeyeon Park)

• 1998.03 ~ 2002.02: B.S. in Electrical and Electronic Engineering at KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology)

• 1996.03 ~ 1998.02: Hansung Science High School

Professional Experiences

• 2025.01 ~ present: VP and Head of Financial AI Center at KB Kookmin Bank

• 2021.08 ~ 2024.12: Research Scientist (& Code LLM Squad Leader) in Advanced ML Lab at LG AI Research

• 2018.12 ~ 2021.07: Principal Engineer in AI Research Center at Samsung SDS

• 2018.05 ~ 2018.11: Chief AI Officer at Speclipse Inc.

• 2017.03 ~ 2018.05: Research Scientist in T-Brain at SK Telecom

• 2015.09 ~ 2017.02: Assistant Professor in Department of Information and Communication Engineering at Sangmyung University

• 2013.05 ~ 2015.08: Senior Software Engineer in Health Service Lab at Samsung Electronics

• 2005.06 ~ 2006.06: Research Intern at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center

Recent Publications

2025

• 🔤 [LLM] SafeDPO: A Simple Approach to Direct Preference Optimization with Enhanced Safety [pdf]

  • Geon-Hyeong Kim, Youngsoo Jang, Yu Jin Kim, Byoungjip Kim, Honglak Lee, Kyunghoon Bae, Moontae Lee

  • Under review

• 🔤 [LLM] Overlapping Context with Variable-Length Stride Increases Diversity when Training Large Language Model for Code [pdf]

  • Geonmo Gu, Jaeho Kwak, Haksoo Moon, Hyun Seung Shim, Yu Jin Kim, Byoungjip Kim, Moontae Lee, Hyejeong Jeon

  • ACL 2025 (Industry Track)

2024

• ⭐ 🔤 🤖 [LLM] Prospector: Improving LLM Agents with Self-Asking and Trajectory Ranking [pdf] [blog (en)] [blog (kr)]  

  • Byoungjip Kim, Youngsoo Jang, Lajanugen Logeswaran, Geon-Hyeong Kim, Yu Jin Kim, Honglak Lee, Moontae Lee

  • EMNLP 2024 Findings

• 🔤  [LLM] ChatEXAONE: Enterprise AI Agent [pdf][blog (en)]

  • participated as a core contributor

  • LG AI Research

• ⭐ 🔤 👁️ [Multimodal] Show, Think, and Tell: Thought-Augmented Fine-Tuning of Large Language Models for Video Captioning [pdf]

  • Byoungjip Kim, Dasol Hwang, Sungjun Cho, Youngsoo Jang, Honglak Lee, Moontae Lee

  • CVPR 2024 Workshop Multi-Modal Foundation Models (MMFM)

• ⭐ 🔤 🤖 [LLM] Degeneration-free Policy Optimization: RL Fine-Tuning of Language Models without Degeneration [pdf]

  • Youngsoo Jang, Geon-Hyeong Kim, Byoungjip Kim, Yu Jin Kim, Honglak Lee, Moontae Lee

  • ICML 2024

2023

• 🔤 [LLM] On Sample-Efficient Code Generation [pdf] 

  • Hojae Han, Yu Jin Kim, Byoungjip Kim, Youngwon Lee, Kyungjae Lee, Kyungmin Lee, Moontae Lee, Kyunghoon Bae, Seung-won Hwang

  • EMNLP 2023 (Industry Track)

• 🤖 [RL] SafeDICE: Offline Safe Imitation Learning with Non-Preferred Demonstrations [pdf] [video]   

  • Youngsoo Jang, Geon-Hyeong Kim, Jongmin Lee, Sungryull Sohn, Byoungjip Kim, Honglak Lee, Moontae Lee

  • NeurIPS 2023

2022

• ⭐ 👁️ 🔤 [Multimodal] Transferring Pre-trained Multimodal Representations with Cross-modal Similarity Matching [pdf] [video] [blog (en)] [blog (kr)]  

  • Byoungjip Kim, Sungik Choi, Dasol Hwang, Moontae Lee, Honglak Lee

  • NeurIPS 2022

• 👁️ [CV] ContraCluster: Learning to Classify without Labels by Contrastive Self-Supervision and Prototype-Based Semi-Supervision [pdf] 

  • Seongho Joe, Byoungjip Kim, Hoyoung Kang, Kyoungwon Park, Bogun Kim, Jaeseon Park, Joonseok Lee, Youngjune Gwon

  • IEEE ICPR 2022

2021

• 👁️ [CV] VaB-AL: Incorporating Class Imbalance and Difficulty with Variational Bayes for Active Learning [pdf] 

  • Jongwon Choi, Kwang Moo Yi, Jihoon Kim, Jincho Choo, Byoungjip Kim, Jin-Yeop Chang, Youngjune Gwon, Hyung Jin Chang

  • CVPR 2021

2020

• 👁️ [CV] SelfMatch: Combining Contrastive Self-Supervision and Consistency for Semi-Supervised Learning [pdf] 

  • Byoungjip Kim, Jinho Choo, Yeong-Dae Kwon, Seongho Joe, Seungjai Min, Youngjune Gwon

  • NeurIPS 2020 Workshop Self-Supervised Learning

• ⭐ 🤖 [RL] POMO: Policy Optimization with Multiple Optima for Reinforcement Learning [pdf] [code] 

  • Yeong-Dae Kwon, Jinho Choo, Byoungjip Kim, Iljoo Yoon, Seungjai Min, Youngjune Gwon

  • NeurIPS 2020

• ⭐ 👁️ [GAN] DefogGAN: Predicting Hidden Information in the StarCraft Fog of War with Generative Adversarial Nets [pdf] [code] 

  • Yonghyun Jeong, Hyunjin Choi, Byoungjip Kim, Youngjune Gwon

  • AAAI 2020 (Oral) 🏆

• 👁️ [GAN] Unsupervised Visual Attribute Transfer with Reconfigurable Generative Adversarial Networks [pdf] 

  • Taeksoo Kim, Byoungjip Kim, Moonsu Cha, Jiwon Kim

  • arXiv 1707.09798

Other Publications

Google Scholar 

Acedemic Services

• Machine Learning / Artificial Intelligence

  • NeurIPS Reviewer

  • ICLR Reviewer

  • ICML Reviewer

  • AAAI Reviewer

  • AISTATS Reviewer

• Computer Vision

  • CVPR Reviewer

  • ECCV Reviewer

  • WACV Reviewer

• Natural Language Processing

  • ACL Reviewer

  • EMNLP Reviewer

• Applied Machine Learning

  • ACM IMWUT Associated Editor

  • IEEE MDM 2017 Finance Chair

Awards

• 2023 LG AI Research Best Challenge Award

  • Research and Development of EXACODE, an EXAONE-based Code LLM

• 2020 Samsung Best Paper Award Bronze

  • DefogGAN: Predicting Hidden Information in the StarCraft Fog of War with Generative Adversarial Nets

    • Yonghyun Jeong, Hyunjin Choi, Byoungjip Kim, Youngjune Gwon

    • AAAI 2020 (Oral)

• IEEE MDM 2006 Best Paper Award

  • BMQ-Index: Shared and Incremental Processing of Border Monitoring Queries over Data Streams

    • Jinwon Lee, Youngki Lee, Seungwoo Kang, SangJeong Lee, Hyunju Jin, Byoungjip Kim, Junehwa Song