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Kihyuk (Ki) Hong | 홍기혁

Assistant Professor

Department of Industrial & Systems Engineering

KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology)

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I am actively seeking motivated PhD and Master's students with a strong background in mathematics who enjoy writing rigorous proofs. If you are interested in joining our lab, please contact me.

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My primary area of research is artificial intelligence (AI) with a focus on reinforcement learning (RL). My main focus is on the design and analysis of computationally efficient algorithms with provable guarantees. I have worked on problems including non-stationary bandits, offline RL and constrained RL.

I was born and raised in South Korea. My alma maters are Johns Hopkins (BS, 2008), Stanford (MS, 2010) and University of Michigan (PhD, 2025. Advisor: Ambuj Tewari). Before starting my PhD, I worked on recommendation systems and search engines as a machine learning engineer at Meta (2010-2013) and Naver (2013-2018, 2019-2020).

News

• 2025/12/23: Seokmin Ko (MS, ISE) joined our lab.
• 2025/12/22: Four undergraduates(Tien Dat Cao, Nurbolat Polatkhan, Rinat Amankos, 김동언) have started individual study projects for the winter semester.
• 2025/09/19: Our paper “Generator-Mediated Bandits: Thompson Sampling for GenAI-Powered Adaptive Interventions” has been accepted to NeurIPS 2025.
• 2025/09/01: I have joined the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at KAIST as an Assistant Professor.