Yeongbin Seo

prof_pic.jpg

MS Student at Yonsei University

suhcrates@yonsei.ac.kr

(Looking for Ph.D. opportunities in the U.S.!!)

Hi! I am a second-year M.S. student at Yonsei University. I am currently at the ML3 lab of Profs. Jaehyung Kim for a research exchange. I was previously advised by Profs. Jinyoung Yeo. I also collaborate closely with Profs. Dongha Lee. I received B.S. in Educational Science from Yonsei University. I also served as a journalist specializing in data analysis in Donga Ilbo, which is one of the top major newspapers in South Korea.

Research Interest (ML, NLP)

My research is focused on building human-like self-evolving AI, and I believe this requires improving the architecture of LMs. For example, to accelerate RL in LMs, the LMs need goal-orientation (bidirectional attention) and faster generation speed, which motivated my research on diffusion LMs. Moreover, for RL of LMs, the token-level granularity of LMs should be compressed into concept-level units in order to avoid the long-horizon (i.e., sparse reward) problem, so I’m currently working on hierarchical LMs (i.e., latent reasoning).

Also, I conducted research on continual knowledge learning, which is essential in self-evolving AI. I also explored efficient learning via data pruning, which will be required for continual learning of a vast stream of text data. I am potentially open to research on embodied agent, to build the emotion and personality of LM.

News

Sep 25, 2025 :tada: Our work on diffusion LM has been featured in nine media outlets in Korea.
Sep 19, 2025 :tada: My first-authored work “Prior-based Noisy Text Data Filtering: Fast and Strong Alternative For Perplexity” got REJECTED with very high rate (4.75/6.0) in NeurIPS 2025 !
Sep 19, 2025 :tada: My first-authored work “Fast and Fluent Diffusion Language Models via Convolutional Decoding and Rejective Fine-tuning” got accepted to NeurIPS 2025 Spotlight (3.19%)!
Sep 26, 2024 :tada: My first-authored work “Train-Attention: Meta-Learning Where to Focus in Continual Knowledge Learning” got accepted to NeurIPS 2024!
Apr 28, 2023 :tada: I developed news article recommendation system of Donga Ilbo, which is featured by the Korean Journalists Association journal.
Aug 23, 2019 :tada: I received an award at the Statistics Big Data Analysis and Utilization Competition hosted by Statistics Korea.

Selected Publications

† indicates advisors
  1. Diffusion LM
    diffusion_4.png
    Fast and Fluent Diffusion Language Models via Convolutional Decoding and Rejective Fine-tuning
    Yeongbin Seo, Dongha Lee , Jaehyung Kim , and Jinyoung Yeo
    In NeurIPS spotlight (3.19%), 2025
  2. Continual Learning
    TAALM.png
    Train-Attention: Meta-Learning Where to Focus in Continual Knowledge Learning
    Yeongbin Seo, Dongha Lee , and Jinyoung Yeo
    In NeurIPS, 2024
  3. Data Pruning
    prior.png
    Prior-based Noisy Text Data Filtering: Fast and Strong Alternative For Perplexity
    Yeongbin Seo, Gayoung Kim, Jaehyung Kim , and Jinyoung Yeo
    Rated 4.75/6.0 at NeurIPS
    2025