Sangwoo Mo
swmo [at] umich [dot] edu
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I am a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan, working with Prof. Stella X. Yu. Before joining UMich, I earned my Ph.D. at KAIST under the supervision of Prof. Jinwoo Shin. During my Ph.D., I had the chance to intern or collaborate with various industry and academic labs, including Google AI, Meta AI, NVIDIA AI, Naver AI, and Kakao Brain, where I had the privilege of working with many outstanding mentors. I also received several student fellowships, including the ones from Samsung, Qualcomm, and Korean AI Association.
My research goal is to design scalable priors for AI. Even in the era of data-centric foundation models, I believe these priors can enhance model performance, reliability, and interpretability. My previous work has demonstrated that priors, such as scene structures and text hierarchies, enable models to address more complex and diverse problems. These efforts encompass tasks including perception, generation, action and cognition, across domains like vision, language, and robotics. In summary, my research includes:
1. Perception
- Scene-aware vision models: NeurIPS'21, CVPRW'22, ICLR'24
- Robust generalization: NeurIPS'20, AAAI'21, ICLR'23, NeurIPS'23, CVPR'24
- Architecture design: ICLR'20, ICLR'21
2. Generation
- Images & videos: ICLR'19, NeurIPS'19, CVPRW'20, ICLR'22, TMLR'23
- Structured prediction: ICMLW'21, NeurIPS'23
3. Action & Cognition
- Language models: ICLR'24, ICLR'24, NeurIPSW'24
A full publication list and mentoring experience can be found here.
News
▪︎ 2025/06: Will serve as an organizer at the PixFoundation Workshop (pixel-level vision foundation) @ CVPR'25.
▪︎ 2024/10: Paper on state-space model (oral) is accepted at NeurIPSW'24.
▪︎ 2024/06: Served as a committee at the POETS Workshop (virtual humans for robotics) @ CVPR'24.
▪︎ 2024/02: Paper on language for vision (highlight) is accepted at CVPR'24.
▪︎ 2024/01: Papers on visual representation (spotlight), LLM long context, and LLM reasoning are accepted at ICLR'24.
▪︎ 2023/09: Papers on vision-language model and structured prediction are accepted at NeurIPS'23.
▪︎ 2023/09: Started a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Michigan.
▪︎ 2023/06: Successfully defended my PhD thesis! 🧑🎓
Experience
Regular Position
▪︎ U Michigan, Research Fellow (host: Prof. Stella X. Yu) / 2023 - current (US)
Intern & Collaboration
▪︎ 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)
▪︎ POSTECH, Collaborator (host: Prof. Minsu Cho) / 2018 Summer (Korea, remote)
Education
▪︎ KAIST, M.S./Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering (2023), Advisor: Prof. Jinwoo Shin
▪︎ POSTECH, B.S. in Mathematics & Industrial Engineering (minor), summa cum laude (2016)
Services
▪︎ Workshop Committee:
- Pixel-level Vision Foundation Models (PixFoundation) @ CVPR'25
- Virtual Humans for Robotics and Autonomous Driving (POETS) @ CVPR'24
▪︎ Conference Reviewer: NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, AAAI, AISTATS
▪︎ Journal Reviewer: TPAMI, TMLR, TNNLS, IJCV, TCSVT, ML, ERA