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Junyeob Baek

I am a first-year Ph.D. student at KAIST working with Prof. Sungjin Ahn. Previously, I worked at Mila-Quebec AI Institute as a visiting student, collaborating with Yoshua Bengio’s group and LawZero team members. My research goal lies in building lifelong developmental agents, but safety-garuanteed. To achieve this, I am particularly interested in world modeling, interpretability, open-ended learning, and the alignment problem. Prior to my Ph.D., I received my MS from KAIST under the supervision of Prof. Sungjin Ahn. Before entering academia, I worked for 4.5 years in industry, gaining practical experience in robotics at Syscon Robotics and AI at Makinarocks.

CV Scholar Github Linkedin 𝕏 (Twitter)

News

• May 2025: I’ll be joining Yoshua Bengio’s group at Mila as a Visiting Student this summer in Montreal! 🇨🇦
• Jan 2025: One paper has been accepted to ICLR 2025! 🎉
• Nov 2024: Successfully defended my Master’s thesis and embarking on my PhD journey at KAIST!
• May 2024: One paper has been accepted to ICML 2024! 🎉

Publications

Discrete JEPA: Learning Discrete Token Representations without Reconstruction

Junyeob Baek, Hosung Lee, Christopher Hoang, Mengye Ren, Sungjin Ahn

ICML 2025 Tokenization Workshop (TokShop)

PDF arXiv

Slot-MLLM: Object-Centric Visual Tokenization for Multimodal LLM

Donghwan Chi, Hyomin Kim, Yoojin Oh, Yongjin Kim, Donghoon Lee, Daejin Jo, Jongmin Kim, Junyeob Baek, Sungjin Ahn, Sungwoong Kim

Preprint

PDF arXiv

Dreamweaver: Learning Compositional World Models from Pixels

Junyeob Baek, Yi-Fu Wu, Gautam Singh, Sungjin Ahn

ICLR, 2025

Project Page PDF arXiv Code

PlanDQ: Hierarchical Plan Orchestration via D-Conductor and Q-Performer

Chang Chen, Junyeob Baek, Fei Deng, Kenji Kawaguchi, Caglar Gulcehre, Sungjin Ahn

ICML, 2024

PDF arXiv Code

Services

• Workshop Organizer: 2nd KAIST-Mila Prefrontal AI Workshop (6 invited speakers incl. Y. Bengio)
• Reviewer: ICLR 2025