Hello,
 안녕하세요
[📣 2025 June Update] I will be joining KAIST AI as an Assistant Professor starting in 2026, where I will lead the Computation & Cognition (COCO) Lab. I will be taking 2~3 students (M.S., M.S.+Ph.D., Ph.D.; 석사, 석박통합, 박사). If you are interested in joining my lab, please tell me a bit about yourself using this form!
I'm currently a Postdoctoral Researcher working with Yejin Choi at NVIDIA for my gap year. Previously, I was a Young Investigator and an intern at the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2). I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from Seoul National University, advised by Gunhee Kim.
My research goal is to enhance machines’ cognitive capabilities through computational methods, focusing on social reasoning (e.g., theory of mind), formal reasoning (e.g., knowledge-intensive domains), and interactive agents guided by these abilities. To achieve this, I explore three key directions: optimizing inference-time compute, synthesizing large-scale data, and evaluating cognitive behaviors. Additionally, I am interested in taking an interdisciplinary approach to my research, bridging AI and cognitive science. In particular, I like to distill insights from human development and cognition into models for reasoning.
Recent News
- May 2025 - I will be a keynote speaker at the 2025 ICCV Social Intelligence Workshop!
- Jan 2025 - I'll be joining KAIST AI as an Assistant Professor in 2026!
- Dec 2024 - I joined NVIDIA to explore new exciting research directions!
- Mar 2024 - Gave an invited talk at the UPenn NLP group seminar about theory of mind and AI.
- Feb 2024 - Gave an invited talk at Google about our recent work on contextual privacy.
- Jan 2024 - Confaide has been accepted at ICLR 2024 as spotlight.
- Dec 2023 - 🏆 SODA won the Outstanding Paper Award at EMNLP.
- Dec 2023 - Gave an invited talk at NUS about our recent work on theory of mind and privacy.
Publications
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Hypothesis-Driven Theory-of-Mind Reasoning for Large Language Models
Hyunwoo Kim, Melanie Sclar, Tan Zhi-Xuan, Lance Ying, Sydney Levine, Yang Liu,
Joshua B. Tenenbaum, Yejin Choi
COLM 2025
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HAICOSYSTEM: An Ecosystem for Sandboxing Safety Risks in Human-AI Interactions
Xuhui Zhou, Hyunwoo Kim*, Faeze Brahman*, Liwei Jiang, Hao Zhu, Ximing Lu, Frank Xu, Bill Yuchen Lin, Yejin Choi, Niloofar Mireshghallah, Ronan Le Bras, Maarten Sap
COLM 2025
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Socratic-MCTS: Test-Time Visual Reasoning by Asking the Right Questions
{David Acuna*, Ximing Lu*, Jaehun Jung*, Hyunwoo Kim*}, Amlan Kar, Sanja Fidler, Yejin Choi
arXiv 2025
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Retro-Search: Exploring Untaken Paths for Deeper and Efficient Reasoning
{Ximing Lu*, Seungju Han*, David Acuna*, Hyunwoo Kim*, Jaehun Jung*},
Shrimai Prabhumoye, Niklas Muennighoff, Mostofa Patwary, Mohammad Shoeybi,
Bryan Catanzaro, Yejin Choi
arXiv 2025
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A False Sense of Privacy: Evaluating Textual Data Sanitization Beyond Surface-level Privacy Leakage
Rui Xin*, Niloofar Mireshghallah*, Shuyue Stella Li, Michael Duan, Hyunwoo Kim, Yejin Choi, Yulia Tsvetkov, Sewoong Oh, Pang Wei Koh
arXiv 2025
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SimpleToM: Exposing the Gap between Explicit ToM Inference and Implicit ToM Application in LLMs
Yuling Gu, Oyvind Tafjord, Hyunwoo Kim, Jared Moore, Ronan Le Bras, Peter Clark, Yejin Choi
arXiv 2024
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Alpaca against Vicuna: Using LLMs to Uncover Memorization of LLMs
Aly M. Kassem*, Omar Mahmoud*, Niloofar Mireshghallah*, Hyunwoo Kim, Yulia Tsvetkov, Yejin Choi, Sherif Saad, Santu Rana
NAACL 2025
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Perceptions to Beliefs: Exploring Precursory Inferences for Theory of Mind in Large Language Models
Chani Jung, Dongkwan Kim, Jiho Jin, Jiseon Kim, Yeon Seonwoo, Yejin Choi, Alice Oh, Hyunwoo Kim
EMNLP 2024
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Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?
The Misleading Success of Simulating Social Interactions With LLMs
Xuhui Zhou, Zhe Su, Tiwalayo Eisape, Hyunwoo Kim, Maarten Sap
EMNLP 2024
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Deal, or no deal (or who knows)? Forecasting Uncertainty in Conversations using LLMs
Anthony Sicilia, Hyunwoo Kim, Khyathi Raghavi Chandu, Malihe Alikhani, Jack Hessel
Findings of ACL 2024
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Can LLMs Keep a Secret?
Testing Privacy Implications of Language Models via Contextual Integrity Theory
Hyunwoo Kim*, Niloofar Mireshghallah*, Xuhui Zhou, Yulia Tsvetkov, Maarten Sap, Reza Shokri, Yejin Choi
ICLR 2024 · Spotlight
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FANToM: A Benchmark for Stress-testing Machine Theory of Mind in Interactions
Hyunwoo Kim, Melanie Sclar, Xuhui Zhou, Ronan Le Bras, Gunhee Kim, Yejin Choi, Maarten Sap
EMNLP 2023 · Oral Presentation
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SODA: Million-scale Dialogue Distillation with Social Commonsense Contextualization
Hyunwoo Kim, Jack Hessel, Liwei Jiang, Peter West, Ximing Lu, Youngjae Yu, Pei Zhou, Ronan Le Bras, Malihe Alikhani, Gunhee Kim, Maarten Sap, Yejin Choi
EMNLP 2023 · Oral Presentation ✶ Outstanding Paper Award
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ProsocialDialog: A Prosocial Backbone for Conversational Agents
Hyunwoo Kim*, Youngjae Yu*, Liwei Jiang, Ximing Lu, Daniel Khashabi, Gunhee Kim, Yejin Choi, Maarten Sap
EMNLP 2022
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Perspective-taking and Pragmatics for Generating Empathetic Responses Focused on Emotion Causes
Hyunwoo Kim, Byeongchang Kim, Gunhee Kim
EMNLP 2021
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KLUE: Korean Language Understanding Evaluation
Sungjoon Park*, Jihyung Moon*, Sungdong Kim*, Won Ik Cho*, ..., Hyunwoo Kim, ..., Alice Oh*, Jung-Woo Ha*, Kyunghyun Cho (31 authors)*
NeurIPS Datasets and Benchmarks 2021
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How Robust are Fact Checking Systems on Colloquial Claims?
Byeongchang Kim*, Hyunwoo Kim*, Seokhee Hong, Gunhee Kim
NAACL-HLT 2021
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Will I Sound Like Me?
Improving Persona Consistency in Dialogues through Pragmatic Self-Consciousness
Hyunwoo Kim, Byeongchang Kim, and Gunhee Kim
EMNLP 2020 · Oral Presentation
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Curiosity Bottleneck: Exploration by Distilling Task-Specific Novelty
Youngjin Kim, Hyunwoo Kim*, Wontae Nam*, Jihoon Kim, Gunhee Kim
ICML 2019
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Abstractive Summarization of Reddit Posts with Multi-level Memory Networks
Byeongchang Kim, Hyunwoo Kim, Gunhee Kim
NAACL-HLT 2019 · Oral Presentation
Honors & Awards
- Outstanding Paper Award, EMNLP, 2023
- Distinguished Doctoral Dissertation Award, Department of CSE, Seoul National University, 2023
- AI Star Scholarship, Yulchon Foundation, 2022
- Outstanding Researcher Fellowship, Department of CSE, Seoul National University, 2022
- Star Student Researcher Award, Department of CSE, Seoul National University, 2022
- Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship, Qualcomm Korea, 2021
- NAVER Ph.D. Fellowship, NAVER, 2021
- Kwanjeong Scholarship, Kwanjeong Educational Foundation, 2019
- National Academic Excellence Scholarship, KOSAF, 2012
About Me
I always love to go taste delicious food. Please let me know if you know some great places to visit! I also enjoy watching Formula One. My favorite driver is Carlos Sainz. Smooooth operatorrrr.