I am currently a PostDoc at University of Wisconsin-Madison, working with Prof. Robert Nowak. Prior to joining UW-Madison, I received my Ph.D. in ECE department at UT Austin, where I was fortunate to be advised by Prof. Constantine Caramanis. I got my Bachelor’s Degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Seoul National University (SNU) in 2016.

Research Interest

I am broadly interested in theoretical aspects of machine/statistical learning and optimization, with emphasis on fundamental questions that are motivated by real applications. I am particularly interested in real-world challenges in reinforcement learning. My current effort is put on investigating the fundamental complexities of learning within partially observed environments, as well as seeking for practical and implementable algorithms in such systems. I also work on optimization theory, with a focus on development and analysis of first-order algorithms for Bilevel optimization, and their applications to various machine learning problems.

News

I am on the academic job market 24-25!

• (07/26/24) I gave a talk in ISMP 2024 at Montreal.

• (06/03/24) Finally, we have a nearly matching upper bound for general Latent MDPs! (arXiv)

• (03/22/24) I chaired a session on Bilevel Optimization at Informs Optimization Society Conference 2024.

• (10/17/23) I gave a talk at INFORMS Annual Meeting 2023.

• (4/24/23) Three papers accepted to ICML 2023.

• (3/09/23) I gave a talk at KAIST AI Institute.

• (9/01/22) I started my postoc at UW-Madison. This place is wonderful!

• (7/15/22) I gave a talk in a Beyond RL Workshop at TTIC.

• (7/12/22) I successfully defended my thesis!

• (5/15/22) One paper accepted to ICML 2022.

• (4/15/22) Presented my work on Reward-Mixing MDPs at MLOPT Idea Seminar in Wisconsin-Madison.

• (9/28/21) Two papers accepted to NeurIPS 2021!

• (5/18/21) Presented my work on Latent MDPs at virtual RL Theory Seminar.

• (3/3/21) I received a UT graduate continuing fellowship for the 2021-2022 academic year.

• (1/15/21) Done with my proposal, and now become a Ph.D. candidate.

Other aspects of life

I used to play the piano, mostly the pieces of Beethoven and Chopin. My favoriate song to play is Chopin’s Etude 25-11. I am also a huge fan of rock and metal musics. These days, I often listen to Game OST when I study or relax. For the summer in Madison, I learned and now enjoy sailing on Mendota Lake.

I am a huge fan of the game of Go, and play it online in my free time. I became interested in playing Go since I watched the super match between Lee Sedol and Alphago, just as much as that event interested me to pursue my Ph.D. in machine learning, especially for reinforcement learning.