I am a postdoctoral researcher at KAIST.
I was previously a visiting scholar at NYU Global AI Frontier Lab
working with Kyunghyun Cho and Rajesh Ranganath.
I received my Ph.D. from KAIST advised by Seunghoon Hong.
My name 진우 眞友 is pronounced [jeen-oo].
I am interested in making deep learning models generalize better beyond their training data so that they can be used
to solve challenging problems, such as those in scientific domains. I am studying this problem from the complementary
perspectives of invariance and equivariance, parallel neural processing, and Solomonoff induction. I often use tools
from theories of graphs, manifolds, (semi)groups and categories, as well as Markov processes such as random walks,
diffusions, and flows.
Recently, I am focused on flow language models, latent reasoning, synthetic data, and vision pretraining.
Best Ph.D. Dissertation Award, KAIST College of Engineering, 2026
Outstanding Researcher Award, KAIST-Mila Prefrontal AI Research Center, 2024
ELLIS Mobility Grant, ICML 2024 GRaM Workshop
Outstanding Paper Award, ICLR 2023 (as coauthor)
Silver Prize, Samsung Humantech Paper Award, 2023 (as coauthor)
Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship Korea, 2022
Excellence Award, KAIST Undergraduate Research Program, 2022 (as mentor)
Kwanjeong Education Foundation Scholarship, 2022–2023
KAIST Engineering Innovator Award, 2020
National Science & Technology Scholarship, 2018–2020
KAIST Alumni Fellowship, 2017–2020
KAIST Presidential Fellowship, 2016–2020
KAIST Dean's List, Spring 2016 / Fall 2016 / Spring 2018
Invited Talks
Flow language models @ MIT (12/2026), Yonsei University (11/20226), POSTECH (10/2026), SNU (07/2026), Discrete Diffusion Reading Group (04/2026), BGU (12/2025)
Architecture-agnostic invariances for deep learning @ Mila (07/2025, 12/2024), KAIST AI899 (05/2025), KAIST-Mila
Prefrontal AI Research Center (11/2024), SKKU (08/2024), POSTECH (11/2023)
Transformers for sets, graphs, and hypergraphs @ Microsoft USA (01/2023), Qualcomm Korea (01/2023), NeurIPS 2022 at KAIST (11/2022), LoGaG (08/2022), KAIST Workshop (01/2022), NeurIPS Social: ML in Korea (12/2021), Naver AI (09/2021), KCCV (09/2021)
Retinal waves and prenatal wiring of primary visual cortex @ Society for Neuroscience, 10/2019