Kihyun Yu

Email: khyu99@kaist.ac.kr

[cv.pdf] [google scholar] [LinkedIn]

Kihyun Yu

Hi, I am a Ph.D. student in Industrial and Systems Engineering at KAIST, advised by Dabeen Lee. I received my B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from GIST, with a minor in Mathematics.

My research focuses on safe reinforcement learning (RL) and sequential decision-making under constraints. I develop algorithms that learn to make effective decisions while respecting safety and resource constraints, with provable guarantees in challenging settings such as adversarial and non-stationary environments, function approximation, and infinite-horizon problems. I am also broadly interested in bandits, online learning, 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)

Sejong Science High School

South Korea

03/2015 - 02/2018

Publications

* Equal contribution

  1. Rate-Optimal Algorithm for Adversarial Linear CMDPs

    Kihyun Yu, Honghao Wei, Dabeen Lee

    arXiv preprint2026
  2. Learning Infinite-Horizon Average-Reward CMDPs via State Augmentation

    Kihyun Yu*, Seoungbin Bae*, Dabeen Lee

    arXiv preprint2026
  3. Constrained Online Convex Optimization without Slater's Condition

    Kihyun Yu, Junehee Lee, Dabeen Lee

    arXiv preprint2026
  4. Learning Weakly Communicating Average-Reward CMDPs: Strong Duality and Improved Regret

    Kihyun Yu, Beomhan Baek, Dabeen Lee

    Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS)2026
  5. Near-Optimal Primal-Dual Algorithm for Learning Linear Mixture CMDPs with Adversarial Rewards

    Kihyun Yu, Seoungbin Bae, Dabeen Lee

    IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC)2026
  6. Primal-Dual Policy Optimization for Linear CMDPs with Adversarial Losses

    Kihyun Yu, Seoungbin Bae, Dabeen Lee

    International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)2026
  7. 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
  8. 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

Notes

T.B.A.