Yongjoo Kim

Hello! I am an integrated B.S./M.S. student in Computer Science and Engineering at Korea University, co-advised by Prof. Jungbeom Lee and Prof. Jinkyu Kim at the Vision & AI Lab. I received my B.E. in Computer Science and Engineering from Korea University in 2026.

My research focuses on vision-language models (VLMs) for video and document understanding, including multimodal retrieval and benchmark design. I am also interested in world models, world action models (WAMs), and vision-language-action (VLA) models.

Profile photo of Yongjoo Kim

News

Aug. 2026 Our paper SAGE got accepted to the EMNLP 2026 Main Conference. See you in Budapest! 🇭🇺
Aug. 2026 Won the Excellence Award (5th place) at the 3rd Wind Power Generation Forecasting AI Competition (BARAM 2026).
Mar. 2026 Started the integrated B.S./M.S. program at Vision & AI Lab @ Korea University.
Dec. 2025 Won the Bronze Prize at the 2025 Inthon Datathon Track.
Jun. 2025 Joined Lingora as an AI Engineer Intern.
Apr. 2025 Joined Vision & AI Lab @ Korea University as an Undergraduate Researcher.

Publications

I work on vision-language models for understanding videos and visually rich documents, with a particular interest in multimodal retrieval and in designing benchmarks that expose what current models fail to capture.

SAGE overview figure SAGE: Semantic Attribute Graphs for Multi-Entity Visual Retrieval
Yongjoo Kim*, Mincheol Kwon, Seonga Choi, Minseung Lee, Kyeong-Jin Oh, Hyunyoung Lee, Yunsu Choi, Jungbeom Lee
Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2026

We introduce DEAR, a benchmark for visual retrieval over images containing multiple entities, and propose SAGE, a training-free retrieval method that represents each image as a graph of entities and their semantic attributes.

* Equal contribution

Research Experience

Vision & AI Lab, Korea University — Graduate Researcher Advisors: Prof. Jungbeom Lee & Prof. Jinkyu Kim
  • Vision-language models for video and document understanding
  • World models and world action models for robot control
Mar. 2026 – Present
Vision & AI Lab, Korea University — Undergraduate Researcher Advisors: Prof. Jungbeom Lee & Prof. Jinkyu Kim
  • Vision-language models and multimodal retrieval-augmented generation
Apr. 2025 – Feb. 2026
Lingora — AI Engineer Intern
  • LLM-based components for an AI language learning platform
Jun. 2025 – Aug. 2025

Awards & Honors

Excellence Award (5th place), 3rd Wind Power Generation Forecasting AI Competition (BARAM 2026) Korea East-West Power, GS E&R, Taebaek Gadeoksan Wind Power · 2,177 participants / 985 teams
Aug. 2026
Bronze Prize, 2025 Inthon Datathon Track 52 participants / 14 teams
Dec. 2025
6th place, 2024 Samsung AI Challenge: Black-box Optimization 980 participants / 421 teams
Sep. 2024
11th place, Microsoft Rice Disease Classification Challenge 901 participants / 206 teams
Aug. 2022

Education

Korea University — Integrated B.S./M.S. in Computer Science and Engineering Major: Artificial Intelligence Applications · Advisors: Prof. Jungbeom Lee & Prof. Jinkyu Kim
Mar. 2026 – Present
Korea University — B.E. in Computer Science and Engineering GPA: 4.04 / 4.50
Mar. 2021 – Feb. 2026