Hyesong Choi

I am an assistant professor in the School of Electronic Engineering, College of IT, at Soongsil University, where I lead SAIL (Scalable AI Lab).

My research is committed to advancing intelligent and trustworthy AI systems by understanding both visual and linguistic representations and their interaction with real-world data. I actively work with students across a broad spectrum of topics spanning computer vision and natural language processing.

My recent primary focus is on
(1) improving the efficiency and performance of large-scale Vision-Language Models (VLMs),
with additional research directions including:
(2) AI security, including agentic defensive AI for autonomous security systems and deepfake detection;
(3) large-scale Data filtering and curation for efficient pre-training;
(4) Social AI, focusing on human-centric and socially aware intelligence;
(5) Reinforcement Learning for adaptive and generalizable decision-making systems;
(6) Autonomous driving-related perception and decision-making tasks; and
(7) Generative modeling with Diffusion models.

 
I obtained my Ph.D. at Ewha W. University in 2025.08, advised by Prof. Dongbo Min. In 2020.03, I obtained my B.S. at Ewha W. University.
I was a research intern at the Backbone Research Group, Naver AI Lab, advised by Dongyoon Han. 

News

[2026.03] Granted the NRF Outstanding Early-Career Researcher Program (우수신진연구), funded by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF).

[2026.01] CLDA is accepted at ICASSP 2026.

[2026.01] Prof. Hyesong Choi will visit UIUC for two months to conduct collaborative research on Social AI and deepfake detection with Prof. Jim Rehg’s group.

[2025.12] RobIA is accepted at NeurIPS 2025.

[2025.11] Prof. Hyesong Choi has been appointed as a Board Member (학회 이사) of the International Conference on ICT Convergence (ICTC).

[2025.09] Prof. Hyesong Choi joins Soongsil University as an Assistant Professor in the School of Electrical Engineering.

• Related Article 1 / Related Article 2 / Related Article 3 / Related Article 4

[2025.08] Prof. Hyesong Choi received her Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from Ewha Womans University, with a research focus on large-scale model pre-training, and was awarded the Outstanding Dissertation Award (Graduate School-wide).

Publications (International)

• Conference

• Journal

• Preprint

Teaching

[2026 Spring] Neural Networks, School of EE & Department of Next-Generation Semiconductor, Soongsil University
(Main Lecturer)

[2026 Spring] Multimedia Convergence Technology, School of EE, Soongsil University
(Main Lecturer)

[2026 Spring] Bio Machine Learning, Department of AI Bio (Graduate School) Soongsil University
(Main Lecturer) - Lectured in English

[2025 Fall] Advanced Programming, School of EE, Soongsil University
(Main Lecturer)

[2025 Spring] Computational Thinking and Programming, CC department, Ewha W. University
(Main Lecturer)

[2024 Fall] Contents Database, CC department, Ewha W. University
(Main Lecturer)

[2024 Spring] Data Innovation and AI Technology, EB department, Seoul Media Institute of Technology  - Lectured in English
(Main Lecturer)

Education

• M.S./Ph.D. [2020.3 ~ 2025.08] (Advisor: Dongbo Min)
  Computer Science
  (Outstanding Dissertation Award, Graduate School-wide)
  Ewha W. University (EWU)

• B.S. [2016.3 ~ 2020.2]
  Contents Convergence, Computer Science
  (Graduated Summa Cum Laude, rank: 1/n)
  Ewha W. University (EWU)

Professional Experience

• 2026.01 - 2026.02: Visiting Researcher, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) (Advisor: Jim Rehg, Research topic: Social AI)

• 2025.03 - 2025.08: Research Intern, Backbone Research Group, Naver AI Lab (Advisor: Dongyoon Han)

• 2024.09 - 2025.08: Instructor, Ewha W. University (EWU)
  (Teaching: Contents Database, Computational Thinking and Programming)

• 2024.7 - 2024.9: Visiting Researcher, University of British Columbia (UBC) (Advisor: Kwang Moo Yi, Research topic: Generative Pre-Training of Large Vision Models)

• 2024.3 - 2025.2: Adjunct Professor, Seoul Media Institute of Technology (SMIT)
  (Teaching: Data Innovation and AI Technology)

• 2021.4 - 2022.3: Research Assistant, Hyundai Motors Group
  (Project topic: AI-based Automatic Water Inflow Detection Technology to Enhance Vehicle Development Efficiency)

• 2020.4 - 2021.12: Research Assistant, Institute for Information communication Technology Planning and Evaluation (IITP)
  (Project topic: Development of Artificial Intelligence Technology that Continuously Self-improves According to Changing Situations in the Real World)

• 2020.3 - 2021.2: Research Assistant, National Research Foundation of Korea
  (Project topic: Multi-task Learning Model Study for Complementary Scene Understanding based on Depth Estimation and Object Detection/Segmentation)

• 2018.8 - 2018.12: Research Intern, Action Power
  (Research topic: Development of Network Architectures and Augmentation Techniques for Audio Data)

Honor and Award

• Outstanding Dissertation Award, Graduate School-wide, 2025

• Boeing-Ewha Scholarship, Received Study Incentives (total funding: 4 million KRW), 2025

• Distinguished Research Scholarship, Awarded across the entire Graduate School at EWU, 2024

• Best Paper Award, Image Processing and Image Understanding, ‘Digging into Semantics in the Mask’, 2023

• Solvay Scholarship, Received Tuition and Study Incentives for two years (total funding: 50 million KRW), 2022-2024

• Best Paper Award, Image Processing and Image Understanding, ‘Adaptive Confidence Thresholding for Monocular Depth Estimation’, 2020

• Best Paper Award, Image Processing and Image Understanding, ‘Pseudo Label-Guided Multitask Learning for Scene Understanding’, 2020

• Academic Excellence Award, Ewha W. University, 2016-2020

• Major Leadership Scholarship, Ewha W. University, 2016-2020

• Samsung SCSC Scholarship, Ewha W. University, 2017-2020

• First Prize, Campus Creative Grant Olympiad Startup Contest, ‘Panic disorder cognitive behavioral therapy application development’, 2018

• First Prize, New Industry Convergence University Creative Startup Contest, ‘Healing Pet Loss Syndrome using VR’, 2017

• Second Prize, New Industry Convergence University Creative Startup Contest, ‘VR Exhibition to visit underprivileged children’, 2016

Academic Services

• Conference Reviewer
  : CVPR (2022 - present), ICCV (2023 - present), ECCV (2024 - present), NeurIPS (2025-present), ICLR (2026-present)

• Journal Reviewer
  - Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence (EAAI) (IF=8.0)
  - International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV) (IF=9.3)

• Society Service
  - Board Member, International Conference on ICT Convergence