Dongyoung Kim

Graduate student at KAIST

KAIST AI

kingdy2002 [AT] kaist.ac.kr

About

I am a 2nd year M.S & Ph.D. student at Algorithmic Intelligence Laboratory (ALIN-LAB), advised by Prof. Jinwoo Shin at Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). I received my B.S. in Computer Science School at KAIST in 2024.

My goal is to build generally intelligent robots that can understand the real world and adapt to diverse situations. To achieve this, my research focuses on Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, specifically on enhancing their world understanding and strengthening embodied reasoning. To this end, I have conducted research on aligning VLMs and LLMs through reinforcement learning, improving the spatiotemporal understanding of vision models, and optimizing policies with RL.

Publications

Robot-R1: Reinforcement Learning for Enhanced Embodied Reasoning in Robotics

Dongyoung Kim, Sumin Park,Huiwon Jang, Jinwoo Shin, Jaehyung Kim*, Younggyo Seo*

Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2025

Spread Preference Annotation: Direct Preference Judgment for Efficient LLM Alignment

Dongyoung Kim, Kimin Lee ,Jinwoo Shin, Jaehyung Kim

International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2025, Oral Presentation (207/11672=1.77%)

Accelerating Reinforcement Learning with Value-Conditional State Entropy Exploration

Dongyoung Kim, Jinwoo Shin, Pieter Abbeel, Younggyo Seo

Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2023

Debiasing Online Preference Learning via Preference Feature Preservation

Dongyoung Kim, Jinsung Yoon,Jinwoo Shin, Jaehyung Kim

Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) 2025 (Findings)

Learning to Correct for QA Reasoning with Black-box LLMs

Jaehyung Kim, Dongyoung Kim, Yiming Yang

Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) 2024 (Long, Main)

Visual Representation Learning with Stochastic Frame Prediction

Huiwon Jang,Dongyoung Kim, Junsu Kim, Jinwoo Shin, Pieter Abbeel, Younggyo Seo

International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2024

Training-free LLM Verification via Recycling Few-shot Examples

Dongseok Lee, Jimyung Hong, Dongyoung Kim, Jaehyung Kim

International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) 2025 Workshop ES-FoMo-III

RoboAlign: Reinforcement Learning for Action-Aligned Multimodal Large Language Models

Dongyoung Kim, Sumin Park, Woomin Song, Seungku Kim, Taeyoung Kim, Huiwon Jang, Jaehyung Kim, Younggyo Seo, Jinwoo Shin

Preprint

SpatialBoost: Enhancing Visual Representation through Language-Guided Reasoning

Byoungwooo Jeon*, Dongyoung Kim*,Huiwon Jang,Jinwoo Shin

Preprint

Contrastive Representation Regularization for Vision-Language-Action Models

Taeyoung Kim, Jimin Lee, Myungkyu Koo, Dongyoung Kim, Kyungmin Lee, Changyeon Kim, Younggyo Seo, Jinwoo Shin

Preprint

INFUSER: Injecting Synthetic Failures for Self-Correcting Embodied Agents

Byungjun Yoon, Dongyoung Kim, Jaehyun Nam, Wook Jung, Jinwoo Shin

Preprint

Dual-Stream Diffusion for World-Model Augmented Vision-Language-Action Model

John Won, Kyungmin Lee, Huiwon Jang, Dongyoung Kim, Jinwoo Shin

Preprint

Verifier-free Test-Time Sampling for Vision Language Action Models

Suhyeok Jang, Dongyoung Kim, Changyeon Kim, Youngsuk Kim, Jinwoo Shin

Preprint

Collaborative LLM Inference via Planning for Efficient Reasoning

Byeongchan Lee, Jonghoon Lee, Dongyoung Kim, Jaehyung Kim, Jinwoo Shin

Preprint

Robot-R1: Reinforcement Learning for Enhanced Embodied Reasoning in Robotics

Dongyoung Kim, Sumin Park,Huiwon Jang, Jinwoo Shin, Jaehyung Kim*, Younggyo Seo*

Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2025

Spread Preference Annotation: Direct Preference Judgment for Efficient LLM Alignment

Dongyoung Kim, Kimin Lee ,Jinwoo Shin, Jaehyung Kim

International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2025, Oral Presentation (207/11672=1.77%)

Accelerating Reinforcement Learning with Value-Conditional State Entropy Exploration

Dongyoung Kim, Jinwoo Shin, Pieter Abbeel, Younggyo Seo

Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2023

Debiasing Online Preference Learning via Preference Feature Preservation

Dongyoung Kim, Jinsung Yoon,Jinwoo Shin, Jaehyung Kim

Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) 2025 (Findings)

Learning to Correct for QA Reasoning with Black-box LLMs

Jaehyung Kim, Dongyoung Kim, Yiming Yang

Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) 2024 (Long, Main)

Visual Representation Learning with Stochastic Frame Prediction

Huiwon Jang,Dongyoung Kim, Junsu Kim, Jinwoo Shin, Pieter Abbeel, Younggyo Seo

International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2024

Training-free LLM Verification via Recycling Few-shot Examples

Dongseok Lee, Jimyung Hong, Dongyoung Kim, Jaehyung Kim

International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) 2025 Workshop ES-FoMo-III

RoboAlign: Reinforcement Learning for Action-Aligned Multimodal Large Language Models

Dongyoung Kim, Sumin Park, Woomin Song, Seungku Kim, Taeyoung Kim, Huiwon Jang, Jaehyung Kim, Younggyo Seo, Jinwoo Shin

Preprint

SpatialBoost: Enhancing Visual Representation through Language-Guided Reasoning

Byoungwooo Jeon*, Dongyoung Kim*,Huiwon Jang,Jinwoo Shin

Preprint

Contrastive Representation Regularization for Vision-Language-Action Models

Taeyoung Kim, Jimin Lee, Myungkyu Koo, Dongyoung Kim, Kyungmin Lee, Changyeon Kim, Younggyo Seo, Jinwoo Shin

Preprint

INFUSER: Injecting Synthetic Failures for Self-Correcting Embodied Agents

Byungjun Yoon, Dongyoung Kim, Jaehyun Nam, Wook Jung, Jinwoo Shin

Preprint

Dual-Stream Diffusion for World-Model Augmented Vision-Language-Action Model

John Won, Kyungmin Lee, Huiwon Jang, Dongyoung Kim, Jinwoo Shin

Preprint

Verifier-free Test-Time Sampling for Vision Language Action Models

Suhyeok Jang, Dongyoung Kim, Changyeon Kim, Youngsuk Kim, Jinwoo Shin

Preprint

Collaborative LLM Inference via Planning for Efficient Reasoning

Byeongchan Lee, Jonghoon Lee, Dongyoung Kim, Jaehyung Kim, Jinwoo Shin

Preprint

Education

Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)Jun. 2024 - Present

M.S & Ph.D. Student in Artificial Intelligence

Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)Mar. 2020 - Jun. 2024

B.S. in Computer Science

Honors & Awards

Recipient, Google Conference Scholarships (APAC)May. 2025

Travel Award, Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2023Dec. 2023