Yongjun Cho
A Senior Research Scientist at WoRV (World model for Robotics and Vehicle control) team of Maum AI, I have 4 years of experience in the AI startup industry. I completed a master's program at the School of Electrical Engineering of Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) advised by Dong Eui Chang, specializing in Artificial Intelligence and Reinforcement Learning.
Intelligence isn't only about language — it's also about navigating the physical world. I believe the path to truly generalizable AI is building embodied intelligence that learns the way nature does — efficiently, physically, and deployably. I build and ship production robotics systems end-to-end: from large-scale data pipelines and VLA model training to on-device inference optimization and real-world deployment across multiple field sites.
Research Interest: Robotics, Autonomous Navigation, Vision-Language-Action Models, Sim-to-Real Transfer, Data Pipelines, On-Device Inference, Diffusion Models, Reinforcement Learning
✉️ cyjun0304@kaist.ac.kr
News
🎉 Our paper D2E got accepted to ICLR 2026! Bridging desktop data to embodied AI - scaling vision-action pretraining with 1.3K+ hours of data achieving 96.6% success on LIBERO! 🤖
🎉 Our paper CANVAS got accepted to ICRA 2025!
🏆 Outstanding Paper Award at NeurIPS 2024 Open-World Agents Workshop (3 selected out of 100 accepted papers).
Publications
† denotes equal contribution, * denotes corresponding author
[1]Kunho Kim, Sumin Seo, Yongjun Cho,
EditCrafter: Tuning-free High-Resolution Image Editing via Pretrained Diffusion Model
CVPR 2026 2nd Workshop on Human-Interactive Generation and Editing (HiGen) Proceeding Track
Co-First Author
[3]Suhwan Choi†, Yongjun Cho†, Minchan Kim†, , Youngjae Yu*
CANVAS: Commonsense-Aware Navigation System for Intuitive Human-Robot Interaction
International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2025
NeurIPS 2024 Workshop Open-World Agents (Outstanding Paper Award)
Co-First Author
[4]Daeseok Lee†, Yongjun Cho†
Fine-tuning Pocket-conditioned 3D Molecule Generation via Reinforcement Learning
ICLR 2024 Workshop on Generative and Experimental Perspectives for Biomolecular Design (GEM)
Co-First Author
[5]Yongjun Cho†, Jae-Hyeon Park†, Jaesoon Choi, , Dong Eui Chang*
Sim-to-Real Transfer of Image-Based Autonomous Guidewire Navigation Trained by Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient with Behavior Cloning for Fast Learning
2022 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)
First Author
[6]Yongjun Cho, Jae-Hyeon Park, Jaesoon Choi, , Dong Eui Chang*
Image Processing Based Autonomous Guidewire Navigation in Percutaneous Coronary Intervention
2021 IEEE International Conference on Consumer Electronics-Asia (ICCE-Asia)
[7]Jae-Hyeon Park, Yongjun Cho, Jin-Yeong Jeong, , Dong Eui Chang*
Real-time Quadrotor Actuator Fault Detection and Isolation Using Multivariate Statistical Analysis Techniques with Sensor Measurements
2020 20th International Conference on Control, Automation and Systems (ICCAS)
Experience
Senior Research Scientist @ Maum AI
Seongnam, South Korea · Nov. 2024 - Present
- Deployed VLA navigation models (1B params) to 4 real-world sites, improving success rate from 75% to 97.3% through human intervention data collection and sim-to-real domain randomization.
- Built multi-node training infrastructure: 5x storage reduction (video compression), 2x I/O throughput (Ceph), 3x training speedup (DeepSpeed ZeRO Stage 2, 4+ nodes, Slurm).
- Quantized VLA model to FP8 and deployed on NVIDIA Jetson Thor, collaborating with on-device deployment team on ROS2 inference pipeline.
- Ran technical PoCs and field demos at orchards and golf courses, directly leading to 2 enterprise contracts with major Korean corporations.
- Built benchmark environments and evaluation pipelines for D2E—1,300+ hour pretraining data pipeline, open-sourced with 8,200+ downloads.
- Designed and open-sourced a navigation benchmark with economic cost modeling (simulation + 50-hour dataset + eval tools). Supervised SNU research intern.
- Selected as lead developer of the World Foundation Model for a government national project (IITP, 340B KRW / $25M budget, 2026–2027).
Research Scientist @ Maum AI
Seongnam, South Korea · May 2024 - Oct. 2024
- Designed CANVAS, a VLA navigation framework controlled via sketches and natural language—published at ICRA 2025, awarded NeurIPS Workshop 2024 Outstanding Paper (top 3 of 100).
- Built the COMMAND dataset (48 hours, 219 km of real-world driving) and multi-container inference architecture used in all subsequent VLA deployments.
- Designed evaluation protocols in NVIDIA Isaac Sim and real-world environments, establishing the data collection and sim-to-real pipeline for the team.
- Filed 2 Korean patents on robot control via sketch and natural language commands.
Machine Learning Researcher @ Deargen Inc.
Seoul, South Korea · Apr. 2022 - Apr. 2024
- Built end-to-end Drug-Target Interaction pipeline (crawling, model design, training, eval) and delivered a custom fine-tuning service to a global big pharma client.
- Designed PPO reward shaping for pocket-conditioned 3D molecule generation—published at ICLR 2024 Workshop, filed as Korean patent.
Education
M.S. in School of Electrical Engineering
KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology) · Daejeon, S.Korea · Mar. 2020 - Mar. 2022
- Advisor: Dong Eui Chang
- Developed autonomous guidewire navigation systems using Reinforcement Learning and Sim-to-Real transfer.
- Led multiple autonomous drone projects, including vision-only navigation and custom radio control systems. Conducted R&D with HD Korea Shipbuilding to develop ship assistance drones featuring relative path planning and AI-driven perception.
- Investigated real-time anomaly detection for quadrotor actuators using multivariate statistical analysis.
- Awarded the Grand Prize in the Autonomous Drone Competition hosted by the Defense Acquisition Program Administration (DAPA).
B.S. in Department of Mechanical Engineering
KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology) · Daejeon, S.Korea · Mar. 2015 - Mar. 2020
- Development of an Autonomous Driving Robot for Library Inventory Management as a Graduation Project
Honors & Awards
Outstanding Paper Awards
NeurIPS 2024 Workshop Open-World Agents
Vancouver, Canada
International
2024
Grand Prize
Autonomous Drone Competition hosted by the Defense Acquisition Program Administration
Daejeon, S.Korea
Domestic
2020
National Excellence Scholarship (Natural Sciences and Engineering)
Covers admission fee, full tuition, and additional support for study grant and living expenses
Korea Student Aid Foundation (KOSAF)
Scholarship
2015 - 2018