Youngwoon Lee

I am an assistant professor in CSE at Seoul National University. Before joining SNU, I was an assistant professor at Yonsei University and a postdoc with Pieter Abbeel at UC Berkeley. I completed my Ph.D. in CS at USC advised by Joseph J. Lim, and B.S. and M.S. in CS at KAIST. I received the Best Conference Paper Award at ICRA'24, the Best System Paper Award at RSS'23, and the Best Paper Presentation Award at CoRL'20.

My research goal is to enable machines to learn complex real-world tasks, especially with complex robotic systems, such as humanoid robots. Toward this goal, I am interested in developing scalable reinforcement learning frameworks that can leverage prior knowledge and diverse data.

News

• [Sep, 2026] I joined Seoul National University as an assistant professor in CSE
• [May, 2026] One paper was accepted to ICML 2026
• [Apr, 2026] I serve as an area chair for NeurIPS 2026 and CoRL 2026
• [Jan, 2026] Two papers were accepted to ICLR 2026
• [Nov, 2025] I serve as an area chair for ICLR 2026 and ICML 2026
• [Oct, 2025] I won 2025 Okawa Foundation Research Grant
• [Aug, 2025] Two papers were accepted to CoRL 2025
• [Mar, 2025] I am co-organizing the workshop on Whole-body Control and Bimanual Manipulation at RSS 2025
• [Feb, 2025] I serve as an area chair for NeurIPS 2025
• [Jan, 2025] One paper was accepted to ICLR 2025
• [Nov, 2024] I will be giving a talk at CoRL 2024 workshop on Learning Robotic Assembly of Industrial and Everyday Objects
• [Oct, 2024] Journal extension of FurnitureBench was accepted to IJRR
• [Sep, 2024] I serve as an associate editor for ICRA 2025
• [Sep, 2023] My first paper at Yonsei was accepted to CoRL 2024
• [Aug, 2024] I am co-organizing the workshop on Whole-body Control and Bimanual Manipulation at CoRL 2024
• [Jun, 2024] One paper was accepted to IROS 2024
• [May, 2024] Open X-Embodiment Datasets and RT-X won the IEEE ICRA Best Conference Paper Award
• [May, 2024] Two papers (HumanoidBench and DROID) were accepted to RSS 2024
• [Apr, 2024] I won the NRF Outstanding Young Scientist grant ($200k for 5 years)
• [Mar, 2024] I serve as an area chair for NeurIPS 2024
• [Mar, 2024] We released DROID, a large-scale robotic dataset
• [Mar, 2024] We released HumanoidBench, a simulated humanoid robot benchmark
• [Mar, 2024] I am starting my assistant professorship at Yonsei University!
• [Jan, 2024] One paper was accepted to ICRA 2024
• [Jan, 2024] One paper was accepted to ICLR 2024
• [Oct, 2023] We released Open X-Embodiment Datasets and RT-X
• [Sep, 2023] One paper was accepted to NeurIPS 2023
• [Aug, 2023] One paper was accepted to CoRL 2023
• [Jul, 2023] FurnitureBench won the Best System Paper Award at RSS 2023
• [Jul, 2023] I am co-organizing RSS Pioneers workshop 2023
• [Apr, 2023] My first paper at UC Berkeley was accepted to ICML 2023
• [Apr, 2023] Two papers were accepted to RSS 2023
• [Dec, 2022] I am joining Yonsei University as an assistant professor in AI in 2024
• [Oct, 2022] I defended my PhD dissertation!
• [Sep, 2022] One paper was accepted to CoRL 2022
• [Jul, 2022] I am joining Pieter Abbeel's lab at UC Berkeley as a postdoc
• [May, 2022] I was selected as a 2022 RSS Pioneer
• [Sep, 2021] One paper was accepted to NeurIPS 2021
• [Sep, 2021] Three papers were accepted to CoRL 2021
• [May, 2021] One paper was accepted to RSS 2021
• [May, 2021] I am co-organizing the workshop on Combining Learning and Motion Planning at IROS 2021
• [Feb, 2021] IKEA Furniture Assembly Environment was accepted to ICRA 2021
• [Nov, 2020] SPiRL won the Best Paper Presentation Award at CoRL 2020
• [Oct, 2020] Two papers were accepted to CoRL 2020
• [May, 2020] In Summer 2020, I will be a research intern at NVIDIA Research
• [Dec, 2019] One paper was accepted to ICLR 2020
• [Nov, 2019] We released IKEA Furniture Assembly Environment for Complex Robot Manipulation Benchmark
• [Sep, 2019] One paper was accepted to CoRL 2019
• [Dec, 2018] One paper was accepted to ICLR 2019

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