Sangwoo Mo

Assistant Professor

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

Office: Engineering 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 Industrial Data Science (IDS) and Artificial Intelligence (AI). 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, NVIDIA, Naver, and Kakao, 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 such as NeurIPS, ICLR, and CVPR.

More details: Research Areas / Publications

News

▪︎ 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! 🧑‍🏫

▪︎ 2025/06: Served as an organizer for the PixFoundation (pixel-level vision foundation) Workshop @ CVPR'25.

▪︎ 2025/05: Selected as a notable reviewer for ICLR'25.

▪︎ 2025/02: Paper on category discovery accepted at CVPR'25.

▪︎ 2025/02: Paper on state-space model accepted at TMLR'25.

▪︎ 2024/06: Served as a committee for the POETS (virtual humans for robotics) Workshop @ CVPR'24.

▪︎ 2024/02: Paper on language for vision (highlight) accepted at CVPR'24.

▪︎ 2024/01: Papers on visual representation (spotlight), LLM long context, and LLM reasoning accepted at ICLR'24.

▪︎ 2023/09: Papers on vision-language model and structured prediction accepted at NeurIPS'23.

▪︎ 2023/09: Started a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Michigan.

▪︎ 2023/06: Successfully defended my PhD thesis! 🧑‍🎓

Appointments

Faculty positions

▪︎ POSTECH, Assistant Professor / 2025–current (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: NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, COLM, AAAI, AISTATS

▪︎ Journal Reviewer: TPAMI, TMLR, TNNLS, IJCV, ML, and others