Dongwon Kim
I am a postdoctoral researcher at KAIST, working with Prof. Jeany Son. I previously completed my BS and PhD at POSTECH CVLab where I worked with Prof. Suha Kwak. My research centers on whether machines can learn representations with the right abstraction and hierarchy, spanning work in compositional representation (SelfMod), multi-modalities (DivE, SaG, MaskGen), and world model (ongoing, CompACT).
24 Sep 2026 A paper on generation-friendly image tokenization is accepted at NeurIPS 2026 (arXiv).
all news →- A paper on generation-friendly image tokenization is accepted at NeurIPS 2026 (arXiv).
- I gave invited talks at Google DeepMind and Yonsei University, about CompACT and abstraction for world model.
- A paper on world model is accepted at CVPR 2026 (CompACT).
- I won POSTECH CSE Best Research Award 2025, recognizing the best research among PhD graduates.
- A paper on 1-dimensinal tokenization and text-to-image generation is accepted at ICCV 2025 (MaskGen).
- I have completed my defense - now I’m officially a Ph.D (thesis title: “Learning Compositional Visual Representations for Vision-Language Understanding and Generation”).
- A paper about object-centric learning is accepted at NeurIPS 2024.
- One paper is accepted at ECCV 2024.
- Joined Bytedance (San Jose, CA) as a research intern
- Our paper about referring image segmentation has been accepted at NAACL 2024 main track.
- I am really grateful to have been granted the POSTECHIAN fellowship!
- A paper about weakly-supervised referring image segmentation is accepted at ICCV 2023.
- A paper about cross-modal retrieval is selected as a highlight at CVPR 2023!
Publications
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arXiv 2026 ACID: Action Consistency via Inverse Dynamics for Planning with World Models WM
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NeurIPS 2026 Structured State-Space Regularization for Generation-Friendly Image Tokenization GEN
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arXiv 2024 1.58-bit FLUX GEN
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ECCV 2024 PLOT: Text-based Person Search with Part Slot Attention for Corresponding Part Discovery V+L
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NAACL 2024 Extending CLIP’s Image-Text Alignment to Referring Image Segmentation V+L
Experience
| 2025 – Now |
Postdoctoral researcher · KAIST, Daejeon, KR
InnoCORE-LLM, PI: Jeany Son
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| 2024 |
Research Intern · Fundamental Research Team, ByteDance SEED, San Jose, US Developed efficient text-to-image generative model using 1D tokens (MaskGen)
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Honors and Awards
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POSTECH CSE Best Research Award, POSTECH, 2025 POSTECHIAN Fellowship, POSTECH, 2023
BK21 Best Paper Award, POSTECH GSAI, 2023
Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship Winner, Qualcomm Korea Corp., 2022
NAVER x POSTECH AI DAY The 2nd and 3rd Prize, 2022
Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship Winner, Qualcomm Korea Corp., 2021
IPIU Best Paper Award, 2021
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Professional Services
Reviewer
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