Biography

Hello. I am a Ph.D. student in Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, advised by Prof. Robert Nowak and Prof. Kangwook Lee. I will join IBM Research (AI Foundation Models) as a research intern in summer 2026, working with Dr. Swanand Ravindra Kadhe.

Previously, I was an Applied AI Research Scientist at Deep Learning Div. in KRAFTON. Also, I was an AI Research Scientist at Applied AI Lab, NLP Center in NCSOFT. I received B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering (EE) from Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) in 2018 and 2020, respectively, where I was advised by Prof. Sae-Young Chung.

A detailed curriculum vitae (CV) is available here.

Research Interest: LM Agent

My research interests focus on language model (LM) agents that are practically usable in real-world environments. To this end, I pursue two directions: (1) improving agent capability under real-usage cases by identifying key limitations of current agents and developing empirical and theoretical methods to address them, and (2) improving agent efficiency by building computationally efficient agents, often based on small language models (sLMs), that close the performance gap with large models at lower compute costs. From an application perspective, I am also interested in applying LM agents to domains such as Embodied AI, Game AI, and Systems (RS).

Research Keywords

• Language Model Agents; Agentic Reasoning; Small Language Models (sLMs); Knowledge Distillation

• Embodied AI; Game AI; Recommender Systems (RS)

News

• (Feb. 2026) 🎉  Our paper "TAPE: Tool-Guided Adaptive Planning and Constrained Execution in Language Model Agents" has been accepted at ICLR 2026 Workhop on Agentic AI in the Wild!

• (Jan. 2026) 🎉  Our paper "T1: Tool-integrated Verification for Test-time Compute Scaling in Small Language Models" has been accepted at ICLR 2026! See you in Rio de Janeiro 🏝️!

• (Dec. 2025)  🎉 I will join IBM Research (AI Foundation Models) as a Research Intern in Summer 2026. 

  A full list of my past updates is available here.

Selected Work

• TAPE: Tool-Guided Adaptive Planning and Constrained Execution in Language Model Agents [Code]
  Jongwon Jeong, Jungtaek Kim, Kangwook Lee
  ICLR 2026 Workshop on Agentic AI in the Wild, 2026

• T1: Tool-integrated Verification for Test-time Compute Scaling in Small Language Models
  Minki Kang*, Jongwon Jeong*, Jaewoong Cho (*: Equally Contributed)
  International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2026

• How to Correctly Report LLM-as-a-Judge Evaluations [Code]
  Chungpa Lee, Thomas Zeng, Jongwon Jeong, Jy-yong Sohn, Kangwook Lee
  arXiv, 2025

• Distilling LLM Agent into Small Models with Retrieval and Code Tools  [Code]
  Minki Kang, Jongwon Jeong, Seanie Lee, Jaewoong Cho, Sung Ju Hwang
  Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2025 (Spotlight)

  A full list of my work is available here.