Taehyeon Kim (김태현)

Senior Research Engineer (Agentic AI) @ Holiday Robotics

Prev: LG AI Research, Google Research, Qualcomm AI, Dynamo AI (YCW22)

Education

PhD — KAIST AI

BS — KAIST Mathematical Science

Minor: Intellectual Property

Bio

I am Taehyeon Kim (김태현), a Senior Research Engineer (Agentic AI) at Holiday Robotics. Previously I was a Tech Lead and Research Scientist at LG AI Research in the Superintelligence Lab. I received my Ph.D. in AI from KAIST (카이스트), where I was advised by Prof. Se-Young Yun in the OSI Lab.

I'm building agentic AI that helps robots reason, plan, and act in the real world. 로봇이 현실 세계에서 추론하고 계획하며 행동할 수 있도록 에이전틱 AI를 만들고 있습니다.

I love coffee, running, and long walks at Seoul Forest, and I enjoy the Seongsu neighborhood culture. 커피를 좋아하고, 런닝과 서울숲 산책을 즐기며 성수동 문화를 좋아합니다.

Contact: kimtaehyeon610 [at] gmail [dot] com

Official website. CV and LinkedIn are up to date.

Selected Publications

Efficiently Learning To Reason or Not to Reason: Root-token Policy Optimization for Adaptive Thinking

Taehyeon Kim, Hyunsoo Lee, Youngsoo Jang^†, and Moontae Lee^†

ACL 2026 · Oral Presentation
Instructive Decoding: Instruction-Tuned Large Language Models are Self-Refiner from Noisy Instructions

Taehyeon Kim^*, Joonkee Kim^*, Gihun Lee^*, and Se-Young Yun

ICLR 2024 · Spotlight
Exploring & Improving Multi-token Prediction (Block Draft) in Language Modeling

Taehyeon Kim, Ananda Theertha Suresh, Kishore Papineni, Michael Riley, Sanjiv Kumar, and Adrian Benton

NeurIPS 2024
Navigating Data Heterogeneity in Federated Learning A Semi-Supervised Federated Object Detection

Taehyeon Kim, Eric Lin, Junu Lee, Christian Lau, and Vaikkunth Mugunthan

NeurIPS 2023
Comparing Kullback-Leibler Divergence and Mean Squared Error Loss in Knowledge Distillation

Taehyeon Kim^*, Jaehoon Oh^*, Nak Yil Kim, Sangwook Cho, and Se-Young Yun

IJCAI 2021

^† co-corresponding authors; ^* equal contribution.

Honors

Technical Reviewer, ICML 2026 Gold · Top 25%
Google Conference Scholarship Dec. 2024 For NeurIPS 2024 multi-token prediction work.
Winner, Qualcomm AI Fellowship Oct. 2022 FINE Samples for Learning with Noisy Labels (NeurIPS '21).
NeurIPS competition awards 2019-2022 Weather4Cast 4th; Black-Box Optimization 8th; MicroNet CIFAR-100 2nd & 3rd.

Leadership

Tech Lead & Research Manager, LG AI Research Jan. 2026-Jun. 2026 Led research across retrieval, LLM alignment, and agentic systems.
Doctoral Student Representative, KAIST AI Mar. 2021-Feb. 2022
Lab Master, OSI Lab Mar. 2020-Feb. 2021
Vice Captain, KAIST ELKA Oct. 2014-Nov. 2015

Taehyeon Kim (김태현)

Links

Education

Bio

Selected Publications

Honors

Leadership