Kihyun Yu

Email: khyu99@kaist.ac.kr

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Kihyun Yu

Hi, I am a Ph.D. student in Industrial and Systems Engineering at KAIST, advised by Prof. Dabeen Lee.

My research focuses on safe reinforcement learning (RL) theory. In particular, I design algorithms for constrained MDPs with provable guarantees under various settings, such as adversarial, linear, and average-reward formulations. I am also broadly interested in sequential decision-making, including bandit algorithms, online convex optimization, and their real-world applications.

Education

Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)

South Korea
  • Integrated M.S.-Ph.D. Program in Industrial and Systems Engineering03/2024 - present
  • GPA: 4.2 / 4.3

Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology (GIST)

South Korea
  • B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science03/2018 - 02/2024
  • Minor in Mathematics
  • GPA: 4.08 / 4.5 (cum laude)
  • Two-year leave for mandatory military service (2020-2021)

Publications

  1. Learning Weakly Communicating Average-Reward CMDPs: Strong Duality and Improved Regret

    Kihyun Yu, Beomhan Baek, Dabeen Lee

    arXiv preprint2026
  2. Near-Optimal Primal-Dual Algorithm for Learning Linear Mixture CMDPs with Adversarial Rewards

    Kihyun Yu, Seoungbin Bae, Dabeen Lee

    arXiv preprint2026
  3. Primal-Dual Policy Optimization for Linear CMDPs with Adversarial Losses

    Kihyun Yu, Seoungbin Bae, Dabeen Lee

    International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)2026
  4. An Optimistic Algorithm for online CMDPs with Anytime Adversarial Constraints

    Jiahui Zhu, Kihyun Yu, Dabeen Lee, Xin Liu, Honghao Wei

    International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML)2025
  5. Improved Regret Bound for Safe Reinforcement Learning via Tighter Cost Pessimism and Reward Optimism

    Kihyun Yu, Duksang Lee, William Overman, Dabeen Lee

    Reinforcement Learning Conference (RLC)2025

Academic Services

Teaching Experience

Honors

Experience

Information Processing, Controlling, and Network Lab (GIST)

South Korea
  • Undergraduate Research Intern (Advisor: Prof. Heung-No Lee)01/2023 - 12/2023
  • Conducted research on lattice-based cryptography

Artificial Intelligence Lab (GIST)

South Korea
  • Undergraduate Research Intern (Advisor: Prof. Kyoobin Lee)07/2022 - 12/2022
  • Conducted research on robust image classification under noisy labels

University of Cambridge

United Kingdom
  • Summer Session Programme (Machine Learning)07/2019 - 08/2019