Minsu Kim

I’ll be joining Microsoft’s Copilot Tuning Research team as a Senior Researcher in early 2026. I will work on advancing the Copilot agent through research on LLM post-training, with a focus on reinforcement learning, agentic behavior, and reliable decision-making.

I am a CIFAR AI Safety Post-doc Fellow, currently working with Prof. Yoshua Bengio at Mila, and Prof. Sungjin Ahn and Prof. Sungsoo Ahn at KAIST.

My research interests include improving sample efficiency and credit assignment in reinforcement learning, with applications to frontier large language models and AI safety.

Backgrounds

I got a Ph.D. at KAIST, under the guidance of Prof. Jinkyoo Park where I worked on bridging reinforcement learning and combinatorial optimization, receiving the Presidential Best Ph.D. Thesis Award.

During my Ph.D., I collaborate with Prof. Sungsoo Ahn, and conducted extended research visits to Mila collaborating with Prof. Yoshua Bengio and his group on GFlowNet-related research.

I completed my master’s degree under the supervision of Prof. Joungho Kim, working on signal and power integrity in 2.5D/3D semiconductor systems (including HBM) using deep learning–based optimization methods.

Education

• Ph.D. at KAIST IE
  • Advisor: Prof. Jinkyoo Park
  • 2022.Mar ~ 2025.Feb
• M.S. at KAIST EE
  • Advisor: Prof. Joungho Kim
  • 2020.Mar ~ 2022.Feb
• B.S. at KAIST, Math and CS (Dual Degree)
  • 2015.Mar ~ 2020.Feb

Awards

• Jang Yeong Sil Fellowship (2025)
• KAIST Presidential Best Ph.D. Thesis Award
• Google Conference Scholarship for ICLR 2024 (as a First author of the paper “Local Search GFlowNets”)
• Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship Award 2023 Korea (as a First author of the paper “Sym-NCO: Leveraging Symmetricity for Neural Combinatorial Optimization”)
• NeurIPS 2022 Scholar Award (Travel Grant)
• DesignCon 2022 Best Paper Award (as a Second author for a paper of Haeyeon Rachel Kim)
• DesignCon 2022 Best Paper Award (as a Second author for a paper of Seonguk Choi)
• DesignCon 2021 Best Paper Award (as a First author)
• IEEE EDAPS 2020 Best Student Paper Award (as a Second author for a paper of Kyungjune Son)

Academic activities

• Reviewer (Conference): NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, AISTATS, AAAI, IJCAI, Learning on Graphs (LoG)
• Reviewer (Journal): IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems (TNNLS), IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI), Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR)
• Senior Reviewer: Reinforcement Learning Conference (RLC)