Chanmi Lee

Jaeyoon presented his research at the AAAI2026 Conference, held from January 20 to 27, 2026, in Singapore EXPO.

His presentation introduced the paper, “Towards Test-time Efficient Visual Place Recognition via Asymmetric Query Processing,” which addresses the critical challenge of deploying high-performance Visual Place Recognition (VPR) on resource-constrained devices. The proposed framework bridges the gap between high-capacity foundation models and lightweight query networks by utilizing a novel geographical memory bank, achieving superior retrieval performance while significantly reducing computational overhead.

Yoonki presented his paper, “Towards Robustness of Person Search against Corruptions,” at the ICCV 2025 Conference, held from October 19-23, 2025, in Honolulu, Hawaii.

The paper introduces new benchmarks (CUHK-SYSU-C and PRW-C) to evaluate how person search models fail when images are corrupted. Based on this analysis, it proposes a foreground-aware augmentation technique and a regularizer to substantially improve model robustness.

Prof. Yoon visited Zhejiang University, one of China’s top universities, and gave an invited talk on our lab’s research.

The visit and seminar were arranged by Prof. Qi Ye, who is also an alumnus of Prof. TaeKun Kim. During the visit, we also had a great time with our former collaborators and SGVR alumni, Prof. Yuchi Huo (former postdoc) and Prof. Min Tang.

This was a valuable opportunity to share our research and reconnect with valued colleagues.

중국 항저우(Hangzhou)에서 열린 세계적인 로봇 학회 IROS 2025에서 SGVR Lab의 반가운 동문, Peng Du 교수님을 오랜만에 만났습니다. Peng Du 교수님은 2014년부터 2015년까지 우리 연구실에서 박사후연구원(Postdoc)로 함께 하셨으며, 당시 충돌 탐지(Collision Detection) 분야를 주로 연구하셨습니다. 현재는 Zhejiang 대학에서 연구 교수로 재직 중이시며, 최근에는 로보틱스 분야로 연구를 확장하며 큰 성과를 내고 계십니다. 특히 주목할 만한 소식은, Peng Du 교수님의 박사 제자 중 한 명이 세계적으로 유명한 로봇 기업인 Unitree의 창업 멤버라는 점입니다. 이를 바탕으로 교수님은 Unitree와 Zhejiang 대학 사이의 (Collaboration Center)를 운용하시며 산학 협력을 이끌고 계십니다.

Taegeun presented his paper at the IROS 2025 Conference, held from October 19 to 25, 2025.

His presentation focused on the research topic, “Efficient Navigation Among Movable Obstacles using a Mobile Manipulator via Hierarchical Policy Learning”. This research introduces a hierarchical reinforcement learning framework enabling a mobile manipulator to efficiently navigate among movable obstacles by estimating their properties and strategically pushing them.

Prof. Yoon, Taegeun, Jiwoo, and Xiangchen Liu attended the conference for the presentation, and it was a valuable opportunity to grasp the latest research trends.

We are thrilled to continue our lab’s tradition by announcing our second round of awards, celebrating the outstanding achievements of our members.

Research Impact Award Recipient: Woojae Kim

Continuing our tradition, the Research Impact Award goes to Woojae Kim for his highly-cited 2023 paper, “Feature separation and recalibration for adversarial robustness.” This award honors students whose research has demonstrated a significant and measurable impact on the academic community. His work exemplifies the profound and lasting influence that rigorous academic research has on the scientific community.

Open Source Contribution Award Recipients: Jumin Lee and Sebin Lee

This year, we are also thrilled to inaugurate the Open Source Contribution Award. This award recognizes students who have made outstanding contributions to open-source software, demonstrating technical excellence, community impact, and commitment to collaborative innovation.

The recipients are Jumin Lee and Sebin Lee. Their project for the 2024 paper, “Semcity: Semantic scene generation with triplane diffusion,” has become highly popular on GitHub, proving that open-source contributions can generate impact even faster than traditional citation metrics.

Congratulations to Woojae, Jumin, and Sebin for leading the way in both foundational research and modern innovation.

Jaeyoon’s paper, “Enhancing Visual Re-ranking through Denoising Nearest Neighbor Graph via Continuous CRF,” has been selected as a Spotlight Paper at ICIP 2025.

Out of 643 papers accepted at the conference, only the top 5.6% were chosen for a spotlight presentation.

The conference, the IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP), was held from September 14-18, 2025 in Anchorage, Alaska, USA.

The research addresses the noisy edge problem, a key limitation in Nearest Neighbor graph-based methods for improving visual retrieval. It introduces a novel denoising method that uses a statistical distance metric to robustly remove incorrect connections, leading to significant gains in retrieval accuracy.

Youngju and Taeyeon won the Best Student Paper Award at ICIP 2025 for their paper, “Pose-free 3D Gaussian splatting via shape-ray estimation.”

Out of 643 papers accepted at the conference, only one was selected for the Best Student Paper Award (Top 0.16%).

They presented their award-winning research at the conference, the IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP), which was held from September 14-18, 2025, in Anchorage, Alaska, USA.

The research proposes a framework that enables high-quality 3D scene reconstruction by jointly estimating shape and camera rays, thus removing the dependency on precise camera poses.

Congratulations!

Sangmin Lee presented a paper at the CKAIA2025 Conference, held from August 7 to 9, 2025. His presentation focused on the research topic, “RFDSI: Rectified Flow Distillation via 2nd-Order Inversion for Consistent Text-to-3D Generation”. This study proposes a method to mathematically reformulate RF distillation, to pinpoint why it succeeds, and to derive the optimal setting that brings the student’s 3D quality as close as possible to the teacher’s.

과학기술정보통신부가 추진하는 생성형 AI 인재 양성 사업에서 LG AI 연구원이 주관기관으로 선정되었고, 우리 연구실이 핵심 파트너로 함께합니다. 컨소시엄은 로봇·물리 환경 이해를 결합한 ‘피지컬 AI’ 분야의 대규모 생성모델 기술을 선도할 인재를 육성하는 것을 목표로 합니다. 이번 프로그램을 통해 연구실은 LG AI 연구원 및 참여 대학들과 공동 교육 과정을 설계하고, 실전 프로젝트 기반의 연구·실습을 지원하여, 피지컬 AI 분야의 거대 생성모델 기술을 선도할 인재를 양성할 것입니다. 관련 기사는 다음 기사 링크와 PDF에서 확인 가능합니다.

과학기술정보통신부의 ‘독자 AI 파운데이션 모델’ 과제에 NC AI 컨소시엄이 선정되었으며, 우리 연구실도 핵심 파트너로 참여하게 되었습니다. 컨소시엄에서 우리는 3-D 비전과 로보틱스 등 차세대 AI 기술의 이론적 토대를 구축하는 역할을 맡습니다. 관련 기사는 다음 기사 링크와 PDF에서 확인하실 수 있습니다.

올해 상반기 동안 준비해 온 AGI 과제 ‘물리통합 지능(Physically Grounded Intelligence)’ 제안서가 선정되었습니다. 이에 따라 연구는 하반기부터 본격적으로 착수하며, 1단계 목표 달성 후 2단계까지 진행해보려고 합니다.

Prof. Sung-eui Yoon of KAIST’s School of Computing has been highlighted in the prestigious ACM SIGGRAPH “Member Profile” series. The post spotlights his more than two decades of leadership in scalable rendering and AI-driven graphics research, along with his dedication to mentoring student start-ups. In the interview, Prof. Yoon notes that seeing his students grow into independent researchers and innovators is the most rewarding part of his career. The profile also traces his path from graduate research assistant to an internationally recognized scholar advancing real-time rendering and Monte Carlo denoising. Read the full write-up and view his photograph on the SIGGRAPH website.

On 23 July, our lab visited DSO in Singapore to present our latest progress in applying in-air sonar perception to robot navigation. Prof. Sung-eui Yoon also met with researchers at the National University of Singapore to discuss potential collaborations between our lab and related NUS groups.

Our lab held its very first Dog Visit Day, welcoming two adorable guests who immediately livened up the workspace. Unfortunately, the pups didn’t quite get along, so the group photo we’d planned had to be postponed. Still, everyone enjoyed the break, sharing treats and smiles throughout the visit. We’re already looking forward to the next session and hope to capture that perfect snapshot then!

On 2 June 2025, Prof. Sung-eui Yoon visited KAIST’s Dogok-dong campus to give a seminar on intelligent graphics, vision, and robotics as part of the 2025 Spring KAIST Graduate School of Software / KTAI Colloquium. He highlighted the lab’s latest research and discussed collaboration opportunities with faculty and graduate students.