Sangwoo Mo

Assistant Professor

POSTECH IME (affiliated with AI, AX, and IDS)

Email: {first_name}.{last_name} [at] postech.ac.kr

Office: Science Building 4, Room 319

Tel: +82-54-279-2202

I am an assistant professor at POSTECH in the Department of Industrial and Management Engineering (IME), affiliated with the Graduate School of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Applied AI (AX), and Industrial Data Science (IDS). Previously, I was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan, working with Prof. Stella X. Yu, and earned my Ph.D. from KAIST under the supervision of Prof. Jinwoo Shin. I have collaborated with leading research labs including Google, Meta, and NVIDIA, and have been supported by fellowships from Samsung and Qualcomm.

My research goal is to design scalable priors for AI. Even in the era of data-centric foundation models, I believe that well-designed priors can enhance performance, reliability, and interpretability. My previous work has shown that incorporating inductive biases, such as domain-specific structures and statistical assumptions, enables models to handle more complex and diverse tasks. These efforts span diverse tasks in vision, language, and robotics, and have been published in leading AI venues (e.g., NeurIPS). Explore our research topics.

If you are interested in joining our lab, please visit the "join us" page. Welcome! 🚀

News (more)

Research news

▪︎ 2026/05: Paper on personal robot accepted at ICML'26.

▪︎ 2026/02: Paper on visual generation accepted at CVPR'26.

▪︎ 2026/01: Paper on dataset distillation accepted at ICLR'26.

▪︎ 2025/10: Served as an organizer for the SP4V (structural priors for vision) Workshop @ ICCV'25.

▪︎ 2025/09: Started as an assistant professor at POSTECH! 🧑‍🏫

Media coverage

▪︎ 포항공대신문 (2026), 거대 AI의 시대, ‘구조’의 힘을 묻다

▪︎ 포스텍 블로그 (2026), “AI는 21세기의 엑셀입니다.” - 산경 모상우 교수가 학부생 인공지능 스터디를 만든 이유

Appointments

Faculty positions

▪︎ POSTECH, Assistant Professor / 2025–present (Korea)

Research positions

▪︎ U Michigan, Postdoctoral Fellow (host: Prof. Stella X. Yu) / 2023–2025 (US)

▪︎ NVIDIA AI, Research Intern (host: Dr. Weili Nie) / 2022 Winter (US, remote)

▪︎ Meta AI, Research Intern (host: Dr. Jong-Chyi Su) / 2022 Summer (US)

▪︎ Naver AI, Collaborator (host: Dr. Jung-Woo Ha) / 2021 Summer (Korea)

▪︎ Google AI, Collaborator (host: Dr. Kihyuk Sohn) / 2020 Winter (US, remote)

▪︎ Kakao Brain, Research Intern (host: Dr. Sungwoong Kim) / 2019 Spring (Korea)

Education

▪︎ KAIST, M.S./Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering, 2023 (advisor: Prof. Jinwoo Shin)

- Ph.D. Thesis: Learning Visual Representations from Uncurated Data

▪︎ POSTECH, B.S. in Mathematics & Industrial Engineering (minor), 2016 - summa cum laude

Services

▪︎ Workshop Committee:

- Structural Priors for Vision (SP4V) @ ICCV'25

- Pixel-level Vision Foundation Models (PixFoundation) @ CVPR'25

- Virtual Humans for Robotics and Autonomous Driving (POETS) @ CVPR'24

▪︎ Conference Reviewer:

- ML: NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, AAAI, AISTATS

- CV: CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, BMVC

- NLP: COLM

▪︎ Journal Reviewer:

- TPAMI, TMLR, TNNLS, IJCV, etc.

Honors & Awards

▪︎ Bronze Prize, Samsung Humantech Paper Awards, 2019 (₩5M)

▪︎ Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship Korea, 2020 (₩4M)

▪︎ Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship Korea, 2021 (₩4M)

▪︎ Best Paper Award, Korean AI Association Fall Conference, 2022 (₩2M)

▪︎ Reviewer Award: NeurIPS'20, ICML'20/21, ICLR'21/25