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Juno Kim

Incoming Ph.D. Student

About Me

I am a Master’s student at the University of Tokyo, supervised by Prof. Taiji Suzuki, also associated with RIKEN Center for Advanced Intelligence Project. My research interests lie in the mathematical foundations of modern deep learning, focusing on nonconvex optimization, dynamical analysis and statistical guarantees for neural networks, as well as exploring emergent capabilities of foundation models. Before moving to Japan, I received my B.Sc. in Mathematics and Statistics at Seoul National University as Valedictorian of ‘23.

Publications

Metastable Dynamics of Chain-of-Thought Reasoning: Provable Benefits of Search, RL and Distillation
Juno Kim, Denny Wu, Jason Lee, Taiji Suzuki. Under review.
Hessian-guided Perturbed Wasserstein Gradient Flows for Escaping Saddle Points
Naoya Yamamoto, Juno Kim, Taiji Suzuki. Under review.
Transformers Provably Solve Parity Efficiently with Chain of Thought
Juno Kim, Taiji Suzuki. ICLR 2025 Oral.
Optimality and Adaptivity of Deep Neural Features for Instrumental Variable Regression
Juno Kim, Dimitri Meunier, Arthur Gretton, Taiji Suzuki, Zhu Li. ICLR 2025.
Transformers are Minimax Optimal Nonparametric In-Context Learners
Juno Kim, Tai Nakamaki, Taiji Suzuki. NeurIPS 2024 and ICML 2024 TF2M Workshop, Best Paper Award.
Transformers Learn Nonlinear Features In Context: Nonconvex Mean-field Dynamics on the Attention Landscape
Juno Kim, Taiji Suzuki. ICML 2024 Oral.
Symmetric Mean-field Langevin Dynamics for Distributional Minimax Problems
Juno Kim, Kakei Yamamoto, Kazusato Oko, Zhuoran Yang, Taiji Suzuki. ICLR 2024 Spotlight.
t3-Variational Autoencoder: Learning Heavy-tailed Data with Student's t and Power Divergence
Juno Kim, Jaehyuk Kwon, Mincheol Cho, Hyunjong Lee, Joong-Ho Won. ICLR 2024.
Hessian Based Smoothing Splines for Manifold Learning
Juno Kim, Otto van Koert. Preprint.
Reeb Flows without Simple Global Surfaces of Section
Juno Kim, Yonghwan Kim, Otto van Koert. Involve, 15(5), pp. 813–842, 2022.

Education

University of Tokyo

2023 - 2025

M.S. in Mathematical Informatics

Seoul National University

2018 - 2023

B.S. in Statistics
B.S. in Mathematics
Graduated Valedictorian of the College of Natural Sciences (GPA 4.28/4.3)

Awards

Doctoral Course (DC1) Research Fellowship, JSPS

declined

Japanese Government Scholarship

2023 - 2025

President Award, Highest Honors, Seoul National University

2023

President Award, Korean Statistical Society

2023

National Scholarship, Kwanjeong Educational Foundation

2020 - 2023

4th Place, Simon Marais Mathematics Competition

2020

Eminence Scholarship, Seoul National University

2018 - 2020

Gold Prize, College Mathematics Competition

2019

Experience

Reviewer

AISTATS'24, ICML'24, NeurIPS'24, ICLR'25, ICML'25

Part-time Researcher

2023 - 2025
RIKEN Center for Advanced Intelligence Project

Undergraduate Research Intern

2019 - 2020, 2022 - 2023
Seoul National University

Travel

I love attending conferences, traveling to new places and meeting people who share my interests. My hobbies are weight training, recreational math and playing the guitar. I am fluent in Korean, English and Japanese and learning German and French.

2025

International Conference on Learning Representations, Singapore

Apr 23 - 29

Flatiron Institute, New York, USA (invited talk)

Mar 11 - 15

Workshop on Functional Inference and Machine Intelligence, Okinawa, Japan

Mar 1 - 2

Vector Institute, Toronto, Canada (invited talk, online)

Jan 24

2024

Neural Information Processing Systems, Vancouver, Canada

Dec 9 - 16

Simons Institute, Berkeley, USA (visiting student)

Nov 11 - Dec 9

Information-Based Induction Sciences Workshop, Saitama, Japan

Nov 4 - 7

Japanese Joint Statistical Meeting, Tokyo, Japan

Sep 1 - 5

UCL Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit, London, UK (research visit)

Aug 5 - 19

International Conference on Machine Learning, Vienna, Austria

Jul 21 - 27

International Conference on Learning Representations, Vienna, Austria

May 7 - 11

Workshop on Functional Inference and Machine Intelligence, Bristol, UK

Mar 25 - 27

Tokyo Deep Learning Workshop, Tokyo, Japan

Mar 18 - 20

Machine Learning Summer School, Okinawa, Japan

Mar 4 - 15

2023

NYU Center for Data Science, New York, USA (visiting student)

Dec 16 - 19

Neural Information Processing Systems, New Orleans, USA

Dec 10 - 16

Information-Based Induction Sciences Workshop, Kyushu, Japan

Oct 29 - Nov 1

Japanese Joint Statistical Meeting, Kyoto, Japan

Sep 3 - 7