Younggyo Seo

Hi! I'm a Research Scientist at Dyson Robot Learning Lab in London, UK.

I received my PhD from KAIST, where I was advised by Jinwoo Shin, and my B.A. in Economics from Seoul National University. During my PhD, I was a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley working with Pieter Abbeel and Kimin Lee, collaborated with Honglak Lee at University of Michigan, and interned at Microsoft Research Asia.

Feel free to send me an e-mail if you want to have a chat!
Contact: mail AT younggyo.me

Google Scholar /  Twitter /  Github /  CV (Aug. 2024)

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My research interest lies in reinforcement learning and representation learning, with the goal of designing algorithms to enable intelligent agents to acquire visuomotor skills and accomplish real-world tasks with minimal experience. To this end, my research has focused on designing (i) sample-efficient reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms and (ii) visual representation learning methods that learn to extract useful features by training generative models. Papers on (i) sample-efficient RL algorithms are highligted in blue and (ii) representation learning methods are highlighted in red.


Continuous Control with Coarse-to-fine Reinforcement Learning
Younggyo Seo, Jafar Uruç, Stephen James
Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL), 2024.
Paper / Website / Code

We present Coarse-to-fine Reinforcement Learning (CRL), which trains RL agents to zoom-into continuous action space in a coarse-to-fine manner. Within this framework, we present Coarse-to-fine Q-Network (CQN), a value-based RL algorithm for continuous control.

BiGym: A Demo-Driven Mobile Bi-Manual Manipulation Benchmark
Nikita Cherniadev*, Nicholas Backshall*, Xiao Ma*, Yunfan Lu, Younggyo Seo, Stephen James
Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL), 2024.
Paper / Website / Code

We present BiGym, a new benchmark and learning environment for mobile bi-manual demo-driven robotic manipulation. BiGym consists of 40 diverse tasks in home environment, and provides human-collected demonstrations.

The Power of the Senses: Generalizable Manipulation from Vision and Touch through Masked Multimodal Learning
Carmelo Sferrazza, Younggyo Seo, Hao Liu, Youngwoon Lee, Pieter Abbeel
IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2024.
Paper / Website / Code

We propose Masked Multimodal Learning (M3L), which jointly learns a policy and visual-tactile representations based on masked autoencoding.

Visual Representation Learning with Stochastic Frame Prediction
Huiwon Jang, Dongyoung Kim, Junsu Kim, Jinwoo Shin, Pieter Abbeel, Younggyo Seo
International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2024.
Paper / Website

We present RSP, a framework for visual representation learning from videos, that learns representations that capture temporal information between frames by training a stochastic future frame prediction model.

Render and Diffuse: Aligning Image and Action Spaces for Diffusion-based Behaviour Cloning
Vitalis Vosylius, Younggyo Seo, Jafar Uruç, Stephen James,
Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS), 2024.
Paper / Website

We introduce Render and Diffuse (R&D), a method that unifies low-level robot actions and RGB observations within the image space using virtual renders of the 3D model of the robot.

Accelerating Reinforcement Learning with Value-Conditional State Entropy Exploration
Dongyoung Kim, Jinwoo Shin, Pieter Abbeel, Younggyo Seo
Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2023.
Paper / Website / Code

We introduce a new exploration technique that maximizes value-conditional state entropy, which takes into account the value estimates of states for computing the intrinsic bonus.

Guide Your Agents with Adaptive Multimodal Rewards
Changyeon Kim, Younggyo Seo, Hao Liu, Lisa Lee, Honglak Lee, Jinwoo Shin, Kimin Lee
Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2023.
ICML Workshop on New Frontiers in Learning, Control, and Dynamical Systems, 2023.
Paper / Website / Code

We present ARP (Adaptive Return-conditioned Policy), which utilizes an adaptive multimodal reward signal for behavior learning.

Multi-View Masked World Models for Visual Robotic Manipulation
Younggyo Seo*, Junsu Kim*, Stephen James, Kimin Lee, Jinwoo Shin, Pieter Abbeel
International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2023.
RSS Workshop on Experiment-oriented Locomotion and Manipulation Research, 2023 as Spotlight presentation.
Paper / Website / Code

We introduce MV-MWM that learns multi-view representations via masked view reconstruction and utilize them for visual robotic manipulation.

Language Reward Modulation for Pretraining Reinforcement Learning
Ademi Adeniji, Amber Xie, Carmelo Sferrazza, Younggyo Seo, Stephen James, Pieter Abbeel
Preprint, 2023
Paper / Code

We introduce LAMP, a method for pretraining RL agents by using multimodal reward signal from Video-Langauge models.

Imitating Graph-Based Planning with Goal-Conditioned Policies
Junsu Kim, Younggyo Seo, Sungsoo Ahn, Kyunghwan Son, Jinwoo Shin
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2023.
Paper / Code

We introduce PIG, a simple yet effective self-imitation scheme which distills a subgoal-conditioned policy into the target-goal-conditioned policy.

Masked World Models for Visual Control
Younggyo Seo, Danijar Hafner, Hao Liu, Fangchen Liu, Stephen James, Kimin Lee, Pieter Abbeel
Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL), 2022.
Paper / Website / Code

We introduce MWM that learns a latent dynamics model on top of an autoencoder trained with convolutional feature masking and reward prediction.

Dynamics-Augmented Decision Transformer for Offline Dynamics Generalization
Changyeon Kim*, Junsu Kim*, Younggyo Seo, Kimin Lee, Honglak Lee, Jinwoo Shin
NeurIPS Workshop on Offline Reinforcement Learning, 2022.
Paper

We introduce DADT, which improves dynamics generalization of decision transformer by introducing a next-state prediction objective.

Reinforcement Learning with Action-Free Pre-Training from Videos
Younggyo Seo, Kimin Lee, Stephen James, Pieter Abbeel
International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2022.
Paper / Website / Code

We introduce APV that can leverage diverse videos from different domains for pre-training to improve sample-efficiency.

HARP: Autoregressive Latent Video Prediction with High-Fidelity Image Generator
Younggyo Seo, Kimin Lee, Fangchen Liu, Stephen James, Pieter Abbeel
International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP), 2022.
Paper

We introduce a video prediction model that can generate 256x256 frames by training an autorgressive transformer on top of VQ-GAN.

SURF: Semi-supervised Reward Learning with Data Augmentation for Feedback-efficient Preference-based Reinforcement Learning
Jongjin Park, Younggyo Seo, Jinwoo Shin, Honglak Lee, Pieter Abbeel, Kimin Lee
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2022.
Paper / Code

We introduce semi-supervised learning and temporal data augmentation for improving the feedback-efficiency of preferenced-based RL.

Object-Aware Regularization for Addressing Causal Confusion in Imitation Learning
Jongjin Park*, Younggyo Seo*, Chang Liu, Li Zhao, Tao Qin, Jinwoo Shin, Tie-Yan Liu
Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2021.
Paper / Article / Code

We introduce OREO, a regularization technique for behavior cloning from pixels.

Landmark-Guided Subgoal Generation in Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning
Junsu Kim, Younggyo Seo, Jinwoo Shin
Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2021.
Paper / Code

We introduce HIGL, a goal-conditioned hierarchical RL method that samples landmarks and utilizes them for guiding the training of a high-level policy.

Offline-to-Online Reinforcement Learning via Balanced Replay and Pessimistic Q-Ensemble
Seunghyun Lee*, Younggyo Seo*, Kimin Lee, Pieter Abbeel, Jinwoo Shin
Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL), 2021.
NeurIPS Workshop on Offline RL, 2020 as Oral presentation.
Paper / Code

We introduce an offline-to-online RL algorithm to address the distribution shift that arises during the transition between offline RL and online RL.

State Entropy Maximization with Random Encoders for Efficient Exploration
Younggyo Seo*, Lili Chen*, Jinwoo Shin, Honglak Lee, Pieter Abbeel, Kimin Lee
International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2021.
Paper / Website / Code

We introduce RE3, an exploration technique for visual RL that utilizes a k-NN state entropy estimate in the representation space of a randomly initialized & fixed CNN encoder.

Trajectory-wise Multiple Choice Learning for Dynamics Generalization in Reinforcement Learning
Younggyo Seo*, Kimin Lee*, Ignasi Clavera, Thanard Kurutach, Jinwoo Shin, Pieter Abbeel
Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2020.
Paper / Website / Code

We introduce T-MCL that learns multi-headed dynamics model whose each prediction head is specialized in certain environments with similar dynamics, i.e., clustering environments.

Context-aware Dynamics Model for Generalization in Model-Based Reinforcement Learning
Kimin Lee*, Younggyo Seo*, Seunghyun Lee, Honglak Lee, Jinwoo Shin
International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2020.
Paper / Website / Code

We introduce CaDM that learns a context encoder to extract contextual information from recent history with self-supervised losses of future and backward prediction.

Learning What to Defer for Maximum Independent Sets
Sungsoo Ahn, Younggyo Seo, Jinwoo Shin
International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2020.
Paper / Code

We introduce LwD, a deep RL framework for the maximum independent set problem.


Research Scientist | Dyson Robot Learning Lab
2023 July - 2024 (London, UK)

Dyson Robot Learning Lab (working with Stephen James)

Visiting Scholar / Collaborator | UC Berkeley
2021 Oct - 2022 July (Berkeley, CA), 2022-2024 (Remote)

Berkeley Robot Learning Lab (working with Pieter Abbeel)

Research Intern | Microsoft Research Asia
Dec 2020 - May 2021 (Remote)

Deep and Reinforcement Learning Group (working with Chang Liu, Li Zhao, and Tao Qin)


Ph.D in Artificial Intelligence | KAIST
Sep 2019 - Aug 2023

B.A in Economics | Seoul National University
Mar 2012 - Feb 2019

  • Summa Cum Laude
  • Leave of absence for military service: Feb 2014 - Feb 2016


  • Top Reviewer Award (top 10%), ICML 2021, 2022
  • AI/CS/EE Rising Stars Award, Google Explore Computer Science Research, 2022
  • Best Paper Award, Korean Artificial Intelligence Association, 2021
  • Summa Cum Laude, Economics department, Seoul National University, 2019
  • National Humanities Scholarship, Korea Student Aid Foundation, 2012-2018
  • 1st Rank @ College Scholastic Ability Test with perfect score (500/500), Korea, 2011


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