Dongyoon Hwang

Hi! I am a Ph.D. candidate at KAIST AI (DAVIAN Lab), advised by Jaegul Choo.

I am interested in building general-purpose robots that can perceive, reason, and act in the unstructured physical world. My research centers on two directions: (i) robot foundation models that perceive and act in metric 3D space, and (ii) utilizing human motion as guidance for robot embodiment learning.

Previously, I was a research intern at Krafton AI and Naver Labs Europe, and received my B.S. in Computer Science from Korea University.

CV / Email / Google Scholar / Github

Publications

Selected / All

See like a Robot: Robot-Centric Pointmaps for Vision-Language-Action Models
Byungkun Lee*, Dongyoon Hwang*, Dongjin Kim, Hojoon Lee, Minho Park, Jaegul Choo. (* Equal contribution)
Preprint'26.
project page / arXiv

3D HAMSTER: Hierarchical VLAs through 3D Trajectory Guidance
Dongyoon Hwang*, Byungkun Lee*, Dongjin Kim, Hyojin Jang, Hoiyeong Jin, Jueun Mun, Minho Park, Hojoon Lee, Hyunseung Kim, Jaegul Choo. (* Equal contribution)
IROS'26.
project page / arXiv / code / HF models

Can Large Language Models Develop Strategic Reasoning? Post-training Insights from Learning Chess
Dongyoon Hwang*, Hojoon Lee*, Jaegul Choo, Dongmin Park, Jongho Park. (* Equal contribution)
CoLM'25, SCALR Workshop.
arXiv

PHUMA: Physically-Grounded Humanoid Locomotion Dataset
Kyungmin Lee*, Sibeen Kim*, Minho Park, Hyunseung Kim, Dongyoon Hwang, Hojoon Lee, Jaegul Choo. (* Equal contribution)
Preprint'25.
project page / arXiv / code

SimBa: Simplicity Bias for Scaling Up Parameters in Deep Reinforcement Learning
Hojoon Lee*, Dongyoon Hwang*, Donghu Kim, Hyunseung Kim, Jun Jet Tai, Kaushik Subramanian, Peter R. Wurman, Jaegul Choo, Peter Stone, Takuma Seno. (* Equal contribution)
ICLR'25, Spotlight (top 5%).
project page / arXiv / code

Do’s and Don’ts: Learning Desirable Skills with Instruction Videos
Hyunseung Kim, Byungkun Lee, Hojoon Lee, Dongyoon Hwang, Donghu Kim, Jaegul Choo.
NeurIPS'24.
project page / arXiv

CoIn: Adapting Pretrained ViTs with Convolution Injector for Visuo-Motor Control
Dongyoon Hwang*, Byungkun Lee*, Hojoon Lee, Hyunseung Kim, Jaegul Choo. (* Equal contribution)
ICML'24.
project page / arXiv / code

ATARI-PB: Investigating Pre-Training Objectives for Generalization in Vision-Based Reinforcement Learning
Donghu Kim*, Hojoon Lee*, Kyungmin Lee*, Dongyoon Hwang, Jaegul Choo. (* Equal contribution)
ICML'24.
project page / arXiv

SARDINE: Simulator for Automated Recommendation in Dynamic and Interactive Environments
Romain Deffayet, Thibaut Thonet, Dongyoon Hwang, Vassilissa Lehoux, Jean-Michel Renders, Maarten de Rijke.
ACM TORS'24.
paper / code

DISCO-DANCE: Learning to Discover Skills through Guidance
Hyunseung Kim*, Byungkun Lee*, Hojoon Lee, Dongyoon Hwang, Sejik Park, Kyushik Min, Jaegul Choo. (* Equal contribution)
NeurIPS'23.
project page / arXiv / code / Bibtex

SimTPR: On the Importance of Feature Decorrelation for Unsupervised Representation Learning in Reinforcement Learning
Hojoon Lee, Koanho Lee, Dongyoon Hwang, Hyunho Lee, Byungkun Lee, Jaegul Choo.
ICML'23.
arXiv / code / poster / Bibtex

Towards Validating Long-Term User Feedbacks in Interactive Recommender Systems
Hojoon Lee, Dongyoon Hwang, Kyushik Min, Jaegul Choo.
SIGIR'22 (short), Best Short Paper Honorable Mention.
paper / poster / Bibtex

DraftRec: Personalized Draft Recommendation for Winning in MOBA Games
Hojoon Lee*, Dongyoon Hwang*, Hyunseung Kim, Byungkun Lee, Jaegul Choo. (* Equal contribution)
WWW'22.
arXiv / code / poster / Bibtex

MOI-Mixer: Improving MLP-Mixer with Multi Order Interactions in Sequential Recommendation
Hojoon Lee, Dongyoon Hwang, Sunghwan Hong, Changyeon Kim, Seungryong Kim, Jaegul Choo.
Preprint'21.
arXiv

Work Experience

Krafton AI Nov 2024 - Nov 2025

Research Intern Seoul, Korea

Built an AI co-playable character (CPC) for PUBG Ally on top of LLM/VLM-based agent systems. demo
Developed an LLM-based chess-reasoning agent post-trained with reinforcement learning. paper

Naver Labs Europe Nov 2022 - Feb 2023

Research Intern Grenoble, France

Studied representation learning for RL-based recommender systems. paper

Other activities

Awards

Spotlight Presentation (top 5%), SimBa, ICLR, 2025.
Best Short Paper Honorable Mention Award, ACM SIGIR, 2022.
Graduation Project Award, Silver Prize ($2,000 as awards), Korea University, 2021.

Template based on Jon Barron's website.