Ph.D. Student at KAIST AI
Minki Kang
I am a Ph.D. student at the Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence Lab at KAIST, advised by Prof. Sung Ju Hwang.
During my Ph.D., I completed research internships at NVIDIA and Microsoft, and I completed three years of alternative mandatory military service as Technical Research Personnel, working full-time as a Research Scientist at AITRICS and KRAFTON. More details are listed in Experience.
Recent
Updates
ACON and SAGE were accepted to ICML 2026.
Started a research internship at NVIDIA Research Taiwan.
Completed a research internship at Microsoft, resulting in ACON: Optimizing Context Compression for Long-horizon LLM Agents.
Returned to the Ph.D. program at KAIST after completing alternative military service.
Focus
Research
I develop agentic small language models that overcome limited parametric capacity through external memory, computation, verification, and distilled tool-use behavior.
You can read my research statement here: Research Statement.
Tool-integrated reasoning and verification
Turn memory-heavy reasoning into retrieval, computation, and checking.
Agent distillation and reinforcement learning
Distilling agentic tool-use behavior into smaller models.
Long-horizon agentic reasoning
Planning, tool use, verification, and sustained context.
Previous projects include domain adaptation and generalization, graph representation learning, and text-to-speech synthesis.
Selected work
Publications
As of Apr. 29, 2026
SAGE: Shaping Anchors for Guided Exploration in RLVR of LLMs
ACON: Optimizing Context Compression for Long-horizon LLM Agents
T1: Tool-integrated Self-verification for Test-time Compute Scaling in Small Language Models
Distilling LLM Agent into Small Models with Retrieval and Code Tools
SafeRoute: Adaptive Model Selection for Efficient and Accurate Safety Guardrails in Large Language Models
HarmAug: Effective Data Augmentation for Knowledge Distillation of Safety Guard Models
Stable-TTS: Stable Speaker-Adaptive Text-to-Speech Synthesis via Prosody Prompting
Face-StyleSpeech: Enhancing Zero-shot Speech Synthesis from Face Images with Improved Face-to-Speech Mapping
Latent Paraphrasing: Perturbation on Layers Improves Knowledge Injection in Large Language Models
Knowledge-Augmented Language Model Verification
Knowledge-Augmented Reasoning Distillation for Small Language Models in Knowledge-Intensive Tasks
ZET-Speech: Zero-shot adaptive Emotion-controllable Text-to-Speech Synthesis with Diffusion and Style-based Models
Grad-StyleSpeech: Any-speaker Adaptive Text-To-Speech Synthesis with Diffusion Models
Sparse Token Transformers with Attention Back Tracking
Self-Distillation for Further Pre-training of Transformers
KALA: Knowledge-Augmented Language Model Adaptation
Edge Representation Learning with Hypergraphs
Learning to Perturb Word Embeddings for Out-of-distribution QA
Accurate Learning of Graph Representations with Graph Multiset Pooling
Neural Mask Generator: Learning to Generate Adaptive Word Maskings for Language Model Adaptation
Episodic Memory Reader: Learning What to Remember for Question Answering from Streaming Data
Preprints
Memory Transfer Learning: How Memories are Transferred Across Domains in Coding Agents
THINKSAFE: Self-Generated Safety Alignment for Reasoning Models
Rethinking Reward Models for Multi-Domain Test-Time Scaling
Workshop Publications
Knowledge-Consistent Dialogue Generation with Knowledge Graphs
*: equal contribution.
Work
Experience
NVIDIA
Research Intern at NVIDIA Research Taiwan
Microsoft
Research Intern at Microsoft 365 Research Team
KRAFTON
Part-time Researcher at Natural Language DL Team
KRAFTON
Applied Research Scientist at Natural Language DL Team
AITRICS
Applied Research Scientist at Virtual Human Team
Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence Lab, KAIST
Research Intern advised by Prof. Sung Ju Hwang
Kakao
Engineering Intern at Context Department
Training
Education
KAIST
Ph.D. in Kim Jaechul Graduate School of AI
KAIST
M.A. in Kim Jaechul Graduate School of AI
Technical University of Munich
Exchange Student in Electrical Engineering and Information Technology
KAIST
B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science