Soobin Um

About Me

I received my Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence from the Kim Jaechul Graduate School of AI, KAIST on August 15, 2025, under the supervision of Prof. Jong Chul Ye. My research focuses on generative modeling, with a special interest in robust and inclusive AI. I also explore the intersection of generative models and physics, particularly in photonic structures. Previously, I worked as a senior researcher at Agency for Defense Development (ADD) for 7.5 years, specializing in wireless communication systems and defense applications. As of September 1, 2025, I will be an Assistant Professor at Kookmin University in the Department of Artificial Intelligence.

News

• 2025.09 – Will join Kookmin University as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Artificial Intelligence starting September 1, 2025.
• 2025.08 – Graduated with a Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence from KAIST on August 15, 2025.
• 2025.08 – Gave an invited talk on MinorityPrompt at the Korean AI Association – KAIA Summer Conference.
• 2025.08 – Presented a poster on MinorityPrompt at KCCV 2025.
• 2025.07 – Gave an invited talk on MinorityPrompt and Boost-and-Skip at the Visual AI Lab, Princeton University.
• 2025.07 – Delivered a joint invited talk on diffusion-based inverse design at The McMahon Lab, Cornell University (with Dongjin Seo).
• 2025.05 – Our recent project, Boost-and-Skip, has been accepted to ICML 2025.
• 2025.04 – MinorityPrompt is selected as oral presentation (top 0.74%) at CVPR 2025.
• 2025.02 – Our paper, MinorityPrompt, is accepted to CVPR 2025.

Publications

Conference Papers

• Boost-and-Skip: A Simple Guidance-Free Diffusion for Minority Generation
  Soobin Um*, Beomsu Kim*, Jong Chul Ye
  ICML 2025
• Minority-Focused Text-to-Image Generation via Prompt Optimization
  Soobin Um, Jong Chul Ye
  CVPR 2025 (Oral presentation, top 0.74%)
• Physics-guided Optimization of Photonic Structures using Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models
  Dongjin Seo*, Soobin Um*, Sangbin Lee, Jong Chul Ye, Haejun Chung
  NeurIPS 2024 Workshop (ML4PS)
• Self-Guided Generation of Minority Samples Using Diffusion Models
  Soobin Um, Jong Chul Ye
  ECCV 2024
• Don't Play Favorites: Minority Guidance for Diffusion Models
  Soobin Um, Suhyeon Lee, Jong Chul Ye
  ICLR 2024
• A Fair Generative Model Using LeCam Divergence
  Soobin Um, Changho Suh
  AAAI 2023 (Oral presentation)

Preprints

• Physics-guided and fabrication-aware inverse design of photonic devices using diffusion models
  Dongjin Seo*, Soobin Um*, Sangbin Lee, Jong Chul Ye, Haejun Chung
  Submitted to ACS Photonics