PhD Student
Graduate School of AI
Seoul National University
chonkang at snu dot ac dot kr

Bio

I am a final-year PhD student in AI at Seoul National University, advised by Prof. Byoung-Tak Zhang. My research lies at the intersection of robot learning and natural language processing, where I explore how language can be used to teach robots and improve human-robot interaction. Specific topics include:

  • Language-driven robotics: Developing (1) vision-language-action (VLA) models that learn visuomotor policies from language supervision (CoRLW’24) and (2) robots that perform real-world tasks through language interaction with humans (ICRA’24, IROS’24, IROS’23).
  • Grounded interaction: Building vision-language models (VLMs) that communicate with humans about images (CVPR’23, EMNLP’21, EMNLP’19) and videos (ACL’21).

My PhD research has been supported by fellowships from Youlchon Foundation and IPAI. I was fortunate to collaborate with researchers in NAVER AI and SK T-Brain.

Prior to joining PhD, I did my master study in Cognitive Science at Seoul National University. Studying cognitive science has sparked my interest in AI and interdisciplinary research. I earned my Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Ajou University.

I'm on the job market! Please let me know if you have any opportunities for me.


News

  • [Nov 2024] Happy to release a new robotics foundation model, CLIP-RT!
  • [Aug 2024] I’m selected as a recipient of the Youlchon AI Star Fellowship.
  • [Jun 2024] PGA is accepted at IROS 2024.
  • [Apr 2024] A preprint for embodied instruction following (Socratic Planner) is released.
  • [Mar 2024] I wrote my research statement about what I’ve been studying.
  • [Mar 2024] A new preprint (Continual Vision-and-Language Navigation) is released.
  • [Jan 2024] PROGrasp is accepted to ICRA 2024!
  • [Dec 2023] I attend Brainlink 2023.
  • [Nov 2023] I’ll give a talk at Dept. of Energy Resources Engineering at Seoul National University (Title: “The Evolution of Language Models: From Basic NLP to ChatGPT and Beyond”).
  • [Oct 2023] Two preprints (PROGrasp and PGA) are released!
  • [Jun 2023] One paper is accepted to IROS 2023!
  • [Mar 2023] Happy to announce that our paper is accepted to CVPR 2023!
  • [Jun 2022] One paper is accepted to ICML 2022 Pre-training Workshop.
  • [May 2022] Thrilled to announce that our new preprint is released!
  • [Apr 2022] One paper is accepted to CVPR 2022 HCIS Workshop.
  • [Dec 2021] I gave an invited talk at Korea Software Congress.
  • [Oct 2021] One paper is accepted to NeurIPS 2021 CtrlGen Workshop.
  • [Aug 2021] One paper is accepted to Findings of EMNLP 2021.
  • [May 2021] One paper is accepted to ACL 2021.
  • [Sep 2020] I’m starting my Ph.D. in this fall.
  • [Jun 2020] From July, I’ll join SNU AI Institute (AIIS) as a researcher.
  • [Jan 2020] Our paper has been accepted to ICASSP 2020!
  • [Dec 2019] From January, I’ll be a research intern at SK T-Brain!
  • [Nov 2019] I gave a spotlight talk at Video Turing Test workshop, ICCV 2019.
  • [Oct 2019] I gave an invited talk at SK Telecom AI Center.
  • [Aug 2019] Excited to announce that our paper has been accepted to EMNLP 2019.
  • [Jun 2019] Our proposed method ranks 3rd place in Visual Dialog Challenge 2019!!
  • [Aug 2018] We have a paper accepted to ECCV 2018 Workshop on VizWiz Grand Challenge.

Highlights (Here are all papers)

CLIP-RT: Learning Language-Conditioned Robotic Policies from Natural Language Supervision

Gi-Cheon Kang*, Junghyun Kim*, Kyuhwan Shim, Jun Ki Lee, Byoung-Tak Zhang
CoRL 2024 Workshop on Language and Robot Learning Project Page Paper


PROGrasp: Pragmatic Human-Robot Communication for Object Grasping

Gi-Cheon Kang, Junghyun Kim, Jaein Kim, Byoung-Tak Zhang
ICRA 2024 (Oral)
Paper Code


The Dialog Must Go On: Improving Visual Dialog via Generative Self-Training

Gi-Cheon Kang, Sungdong Kim*, Jin-Hwa Kim*, Donghyun Kwak*, Byoung-Tak Zhang
CVPR 2023
ICML 2022 Workshop on Pre-training: Perspectives, Pitfalls, and Paths Forward Project Page Paper Code Slides Video


Invited Talks

PROGrasp: Pragmatic Human-Robot Communication for Object Grasping

IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA, May 2024)

The Evolution of Language Models: From Basic NLP to ChatGPT and Beyond

Dept. of Energy Resources Engineering, Seoul National University (Nov. 2023)

The Dialog Must Go On: Improving Visual Dialog via Generative Self-Training

IEEE RO-MAN Workshop on Learning by Asking for Intelligent Robots and Agents (Aug. 2023)

Reasoning Visual Dialog with Sparse Graph Learning and Knowledge Transfer

KSC 2021 - Top-tier Conference Paper Presentation Session (Dec. 2021)
Annual Conference on Human and Cognitive Language Technology (Oct. 2021)

Dual Attention Networks for Visual Reference Resolution in Visual Dialog

ICCV 2019 - Video Turing Test Workshop (Spotlight Talk) (Nov. 2019)
SK Telecom AI Center (Sep. 2019)


Services

Reviewing
🟥 = ML or AI / 🟩 = NLP / 🟦 = Robotics / 🟨 = Workshops
🟥 Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2023-2024
🟥 International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2024-2025
🟥 International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2024-2025
🟥 AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2025
🟩 ACL Rolling Review (ARR), 2024
🟩 Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2023-2024
🟩 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2022-2023
🟦 IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), 2024
🟦 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2024
🟨 CoRL Workshop on Language and Robot Learning (LangRob), 2024
🟨 ICLR Workshop on Reliable and Responsible Foundation Models, 2024
🟨 ICML Workshop on Pre-training: Perspectives, Pitfalls, and Paths Forward, 2022


(Courtesy: Abhishek Das)