AI Research Engineer · Upstage · Seoul

Dongjun Kim

Making evals trustworthy and robust, and closing the gap between eval analysis and training decisions.

I'm an AI Research Engineer at Upstage, where I evaluate Solar, our frontier model family, through 50+ benchmark campaigns that steer training and data decisions. I work on agentic eval environments, AI safety, and mechanistic interpretability, with first-author orals at ACL 2026 and EMNLP 2025. Previously, I was in the NLP&AI Lab at Korea University, advised by Prof. Heuiseok Lim.

Portrait of Dongjun Kim
02

Publications

Click an entry to expand the case study

01

A 250B-A15B Mixture-of-Experts open model with a 1M-token context window, built for long-horizon agentic tasks.

Upstage Solar Team

Technical Report · 2026
Abstract
We present Solar Open 2, a 250B-A15B Mixture-of-Experts language model built for long-horizon agentic tasks, scaled up from Solar Open 1 (Solar Open 100B). To hold entire agent trajectories in a single context, Solar Open 2 reaches a 1M-token window through a hybrid attention stack that interleaves one softmax layer among every three linear-attention layers, using no positional encoding and a gated delta rule extended to negative eigenvalues. To train at this scale under a fixed compute budget, we make training efficient in two ways: a stronger starting point, and higher-value data. For the starting point, we initialize Solar Open 2 from Solar Open 1, transferring the 5.69B-parameter shared skeleton that survives the architectural change and learning everything else through full pre-training. For the data, we curate for value per token: quality- and rarity-aware data curation and mixture-ratio optimization refine a 20T pool into a 10T mixture that, at equal token budget, outperforms the Solar Open 1 recipe. To build its agent skills, we train twelve domain specialists across purpose-built scenarios, then consolidate them into a single model by Multi-teacher On-Policy Distillation (MOPD). Against comparably sized open-weight models on English benchmarks, Solar Open 2 leads on MMLU-Pro, LiveCodeBench, and the APEX-Agents agentic suite, and stays competitive with the strongest (DeepSeek-V4-Flash and MiMo-V2.5) elsewhere. On Korean benchmarks, Solar Open 2 records the highest average of any model compared, including fast-tier closed APIs, and on Ko-GDPval, an in-house Korean officework-agent benchmark, it is competitive with DeepSeek-V4-Pro (1.6T) at less than a sixth of its size.
02

Removes language identity from embeddings at inference time to improve cross-lingual retrieval.

Dongjun Kim, Jeongho Yoon, Chanjun Park, Heuiseok Lim

ACL 2026 · Main · Oral
LangSAE Editing method overview
Background
In multilingual retrieval, dense embeddings also encode language signals that can overshadow relevant cross-language evidence
Problem
Remove language signals at inference time to improve cross-language retrieval, without retraining the base model or re-encoding text
Method
  • Decompose embeddings into latent units with a sparse autoencoder
  • Identify language-associated latent units via cross-language activation statistics
  • Post-hoc editing removes those signals at inference while preserving the original embedding dimensions
Results
  • Consistent retrieval improvements across multiple languages
  • Strongest gains across different writing systems
  • Drops into existing systems with no retraining or re-encoding required
Role
  • First author: led the methodology and overall study design
  • Implemented the SAE-based language-latent identification and removal pipeline
  • Designed the multilingual retrieval experiments; led analysis and writing
03

Locates the compact parameter region that LLM coding ability lives in.

Dongjun Kim, Minhyuk Kim, Yong Chan Chun, Chanjun Park, Heuiseok Lim

ACL 2026 · Findings
Coding Spot analysis
Background
LLMs are strong at code generation and comprehension, but whether that ability lives in shared or language-specific parameters was unknown
Problem
Identify and characterize the parametric region responsible for coding: the Coding Spot
Method
  • Isolate candidate parameter subsets per programming language and across languages
  • Apply targeted modification and ablation to the identified subset
  • Compare coding vs. non-coding task performance before and after to establish causal contribution
Results
  • A compact Coding Spot exists: modifying it sharply degrades coding tasks
  • Non-coding capabilities are largely preserved, showing compartmentalization akin to functional specialization in the brain
Role
  • First author: conceived the approach and methodology
  • Implemented the ablation experiments and evaluation sweeps at layer/module granularity (reproducible tooling)
  • Designed control tasks verifying non-coding preservation; led analysis and writing
04

A tri-modal benchmark of cultural awareness across 8 Asian countries and 10 languages.

Weihua Zheng, Zhengyuan Liu, et al., incl. Dongjun Kim (35 authors)

ACL 2026 · Main
MMAC benchmark overview
Background
Multimodal understanding and reasoning often degrade outside Western, high-resource settings, and culture-aware evaluation has lagged behind
Problem
Quantify cultural awareness across Asian languages and modalities, and verify that models answer for the right reasons
Method
  • Human-curated benchmark across 8 Asian countries, 10 languages, 27,000 questions; 79% require multi-step cultural reasoning
  • First dataset input-aligned across text, image, and speech, enabling direct cross-modal transfer tests
  • Five-dimensional protocol: country disparities, cross-lingual and cross-modal consistency, generalization, grounding validity
  • A grounding validation module detects shortcut learning; Vision-ablated Prefix Replay (VPR) probes modality divergence
Results
  • Reveals cultural-awareness gaps across countries and languages
  • Demonstrates cross-modal inconsistency and shortcut-learning risks in current models
Role
  • Led the Korean subset: taxonomy design, image collection, and QA authoring guidelines
  • Evaluated diverse VLMs and calibrated quality-control criteria
  • Contributed analysis and writing
05

A multi-turn simulation harness that tests how well models help people across 10 East and Southeast Asian regions.

Bryan Chen Zhengyu Tan, Weihua Zheng, et al., incl. Dongjun Kim, Roy Ka-Wei Lee

EMNLP 2026 · Main
Summary
Most cultural evaluations of LLMs test single-turn recall with multiple-choice questions. CultureConverse instead simulates multi-turn help-seeking dialogues across 10 East and Southeast Asian regions, 58 subgroup identities, and 7 domains, and scores the assistance. The released CultureConverse-DS has 14,610 evaluation episodes and 274,295 oracle-guided dialogues. Across 18 models, automated scores track human judgments, and fine-tuning on 27,860 high-quality samples improves in-domain assistance and transfers to cultural MCQ and safety classification.
06

A Korean-sovereign LLM series at 100B / 20B / 7B scales built on a Mixture-of-Experts architecture with Multi-Latent Attention.

NC-AI Consortium

Technical Report · 2026
Abstract
This report introduces VAETKI, a series of large language models developed at 100B, 20B, and 7B scales to secure national data sovereignty and promote industrial AI Transformation (AX). The models utilize a decoder-only Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture, integrating Multi-Latent Attention (MLA) with Local-Global Interleaving. This configuration achieves an 83% reduction in KV cache size and a 40% gain in training efficiency compared to conventional MLA. Our pre-training corpus involves a curated 5-trillion-token subset selected through a seven-stage refinement pipeline from a total of 20 trillion tokens. We further implemented a three-stage post-training pipeline—consisting of Reasoning-centric SFT, High-Quality SFT, and DPO—trained on 8 million instruction-tuning triplets. This effort was complemented by 17.6 billion tokens of specialized datasets for multilingual, cultural, and reasoning domains. Evaluation results on VAETKI-100B-A10B show significant performance on Korean benchmarks like CLIcK and KoBALT, alongside robust instruction-following capabilities as measured by IFEval. The results demonstrate that the VAETKI series provides a specialized foundation for high-performance AI applications optimized for the Korean context.
07

CrossDocVQA: A Benchmark for Multi-Hop Cross-Document Visual Question Answering

Gyuho Shim, J. Shin, Dongjun Kim, Chanjun Park, Heuiseok Lim

arXiv · 2026
08

Decomposes benchmark scores into the cognitive abilities they actually measure.

Dongjun Kim, Gyuho Shim, Yong Chan Chun, Minhyuk Kim, Chanjun Park, Heuiseok Lim

EMNLP 2025 · Main · Oral
Benchmark Profiling framework
Background
Benchmark scores are read as evidence of specific capabilities, yet a single number masks the mixture of abilities a task actually requires, and gains often fail to match user-perceived competence
Problem
Establish a framework that systematically diagnoses and quantifies which cognitive abilities each benchmark actually measures
Method
  • Define 10 cognitively grounded abilities with ability-specific diagnostic datasets
  • Locate ability-relevant parameters via gradient-based importance
  • Apply targeted MLP weight ablation and compare original vs. ablated performance to compute an Ability Impact Score (AIS)
  • Profile three instruction-tuned models across ten widely used benchmarks
Results
  • Most benchmarks tap a mixture of abilities, not the single skill on their label
  • Similarly labeled datasets rely on distinct ability mixes
  • Code generation rewards broad multi-skill improvement; narrow fine-tuning yields modest gains
  • Task-irrelevant abilities can interfere and hurt performance
Role
  • First author: led the methodology and overall study design
  • Built the diagnostic datasets and the gradient-importance / ablation pipelines as reproducible tooling
  • Automated large-scale experiment sweeps; designed and ran the human-expert evaluation
  • Led analysis, writing, and the open-source release
09

Keeps LLMs current with Korean legal amendments through on-the-fly knowledge editing.

Jaehyung Seo, Dahyun Jung, Jaewook Lee, Yong Chan Chun, Dongjun Kim, Hwijung Ryu, Donghoon Shin, Heuiseok Lim

EMNLP 2025 · Findings
KoLEG framework
Background
Korean law evolves through frequent, fine-grained amendments; even minor wording changes carry legal weight, yet retraining an LLM for every revision is impractical
Problem
Edit legal knowledge on the fly, achieving edit success, preservation, and generalization under continuous sequential updates
Method
  • Editing-Aware Learning Strategy combined with continuous retrieval
  • LawEdit Retriever for amendment-aware retrieval
  • Korean Legislative Amendment Dataset, built for temporal dynamics and linguistic subtlety
  • Timestamp-aware evaluation protocol
Results
  • Outperforms locate-then-edit and retrieval-based editing baselines while preserving linguistic capabilities
  • Stays robust under sequential edits; improves precedent-application tasks
  • Qualitatively validated by legal experts
Role
  • Designed and built the Korean law crawling pipeline: effective-date alignment, high-precision filtering, change tracking
  • Implemented timestamp-aware evaluation and quality control
  • Analyzed results and co-wrote the paper
10

Syntax-based demonstration retrieval that fixes term-boundary errors in LLM term extraction.

Yong Chan Chun, Minhyuk Kim, Dongjun Kim, Chanjun Park, Heuiseok Lim

ACL 2025 · Findings
Syntactic retrieval for ATE
Background
  • Automatic Term Extraction (ATE) identifies the domain-specific terms that underpin machine translation, information retrieval, and more
  • LLM-based ATE is barely explored, and term-boundary identification is the hard part
Problem
Semantic-similarity demonstration retrieval misleads term-boundary recognition under domain mismatch, so retrieve demonstrations by syntax instead
Method
  • Retrieve few-shot demonstrations by syntactic similarity over parse trees using FastKASSIM
  • Domain-agnostic guidance for capturing term boundaries
  • Analyze how lexical overlap between the query and retrieved examples affects performance
Results
  • Consistent F1 gains on three specialized ATE benchmarks (ACTER, ACLR2, BCGM)
  • Notably more stable than semantic retrieval in cross-domain settings
Role
  • Co-author: contributed to experiment design and methodology
  • Supported the syntactic retrieval experiments and analysis
11

The first open-ended benchmark for Korean instruction following.

Dongjun Kim, Chanhee Park, Chanjun Park, Heuiseok Lim

arXiv · 2025
KITE benchmark overview
Background
Instruction-following evaluation is English-centric; Korean, with honorifics, rich morphology, and dual numbering systems, lacked an open-ended benchmark
Problem
Measure both general and Korean-specific instruction following on diverse open-ended tasks, fairly and reproducibly
Method
  • Tasks and prompts target Korean-specific phenomena (honorific shifts, morphology, dual numerals) alongside general instructions
  • Open-ended generation rather than multiple choice
  • Evaluation pipeline combines automated metrics with human assessment
  • Full public release of dataset and code
Results
  • Reveals performance disparities across models with per-ability insight into strengths and weaknesses
  • Released on Hugging Face and GitHub; used as a reference benchmark for Korean LLM comparison
Role
  • First author: designed and built the benchmark (tasks, prompts, scoring)
  • Ran large-scale automated and human evaluations; led the analysis
  • Released and maintains the public artifacts
12

Towards Computational Comprehension: A Non-Anthropocentric Framework for Evaluating LLM Understanding

Dongjun Kim, Gyuho Shim, Minhyuk Kim, Chanjun Park, Heuiseok Lim

arXiv · 2025
13

A leaderboard that regenerates itself daily from real-world data.

Chanjun Park, Hyeonseok Moon, Dongjun Kim, Seolhwa Lee, Jaehyung Seo, Sugyeong Eo, Heuiseok Lim

arXiv · 2025
Self-Improving Leaderboard overview
Background
Static test-set leaderboards fail to reflect rapidly changing models and data distributions, and they incentivize test-set overfitting
Problem
Build a fair, sustainable comparison framework with time-aware ranking and regression detection
Method
  • Agent system collects daily news → LLM agents generate and review Q&A items → multi-LLM automated evaluation (vLLM backend) → time-aware ranking with stability and volatility metrics
  • Live leaderboard operated on Hugging Face Spaces
Results
  • Stabilized real-time benchmark operations
  • Time-aware ranking with stability/volatility metrics and quarterly regression detection
  • Automation reduced operational cost and risk
Role
  • Agentic engineering lead: built the news-crawling agents (sources, scheduling, deduplication)
  • Designed the LLM agent pipeline converting daily news into reviewed Q&A benchmark items
  • Implemented the vLLM-based automated evaluation pipeline and time-aware ranking
  • Operated the live leaderboard on HF Spaces with monitoring and data hygiene
14

Measures ChatGPT and GPT-4 toxicity across Korean social issues and personas.

Seungyoon Lee, Dongjun Kim, Dahyun Jung, Chanjun Park, Heuiseok Lim

NAACL 2024 · SRW
Korean social bias analysis
Background
  • LLM bias and toxicity are widely studied, but almost entirely in English-speaking contexts
  • Rigorous analysis within the Korean sociocultural context was missing
Problem
Quantify and compare ChatGPT vs. GPT-4 toxicity under Korean social issues and persona conditions
Method
Design prompts reflecting major Korean social issues with varied personas → collect model outputs → compute automated toxicity metrics with human validation → analyze bias patterns by condition
Results
  • Certain persona–issue combinations consistently yield harmful content
  • Under some conditions GPT-4 produces more than twice the toxicity of ChatGPT
Role
  • Analyzed and organized results across persona and issue conditions
  • Built the visualizations and co-wrote the paper
15

An agent-based city digital twin for high-resolution pandemic forecasting.

Shakir Bilal, Wajdi Zaatour, Yilian Alonso Otano, Arindam Saha, Ken Newcomb, Soo Kim, Dongjun Kim, Raveena Ginjala, Derek Groen, Edwin Michael

Complex & Intelligent Systems · 2024
CitySEIRCast digital twin
Background
City-scale epidemic forecasting must handle population/spatial heterogeneity and early-data scarcity, calling for high-resolution digital-twin simulation
Problem
Couple an agent-based transmission model with real-world city data pipelines to deliver timely, high-resolution forecasts
Method
  • Build a city digital twin from navigation and social data, coupled with a modular agent-based SEIR model
  • Automate pipelines for scalable execution on hybrid cloud/HPC
Results
  • Realistic city-level simulations with high-resolution spatiotemporal forecasts
  • Actionable for identifying vulnerable groups/hotspots and evaluating policy scenarios
Role
  • Analyzed and cleaned county-provided COVID data (validation, missing-data handling, metadata curation)
  • Set up the HPC environment (Slurm, modules, containers) and large-scale batch pipelines
  • Optimized Python/C++ simulation code; implemented the agent-based SEIR application end to end
  • Deployed on Azure with containers; configured monitoring and logging
03

Models

Click a model to expand

Upstage

  1. 01

    Compact model for high-volume agent workloads

    Sep 2026 Evaluation Infrastructure Agent Workloads
    Released
    Sep 2026
    Architecture
    35B-A3B MoE
    Context
    512K tokens
    AAII
    24

    My part

    • Evaluated SFT and RL checkpoints, using repeated-run ablations of sampling and serving settings to separate real gains from run-to-run noise.
  2. 02

    Flagship reasoning model for long-horizon agentic workflows

    Aug 2026 Evaluation Infrastructure Long-Horizon Agents
    Released
    Aug 2026
    Context
    512K tokens
    AAII
    42

    My part

    • Tracked progress against frontier models and prior Solar generations across the full benchmark suite, with a focus on agentic long-horizon benchmarks, analyzing regressions between checkpoints to guide training.
    • Built and ran the evaluation infrastructure behind it: the same reproducible, high-throughput stack developed for Solar Open 2.
  3. 03

    Frontier open model for long-horizon agentic tasks

    Jul 2026 Evaluation Infrastructure
    Released
    Jul 2026
    Architecture
    250B-A15B MoE
    Context
    1M tokens
    AAII
    37

    My part

    • Ran competitor baselines for the Solar Open 2 tech report.
    • Cut a full Solar Open 2 suite (~50 benchmarks) from several days to ~7 hours with an optimizer that packs benchmarks into single-node Slurm shards based on profiled throughput.

Korea University

  1. 04

    Evaluation · consortium foundation model with NC AI and ETRI · 2025

    Year
    2025
    Partners
    NC AI · ETRI

    My part

    • Engineered the evaluation pipeline for the National Foundation Model Project, standardizing 50+ benchmarks into a single reproducible runtime with automated regression tracking across checkpoints.
    • Designed a unified metric layer and Weights & Biases dashboards for time-series tracking, regression checks, and cross-model slice analysis.
    • Ran pre- and post-training analyses on successive VAETKI checkpoints, identified failure modes, and informed data and recipe updates.
    • Introduced contamination checks (deduplication and overlap scans) and standardized runbooks for fair, comparable evaluations.
  2. 05

    Training · post-training and RL with GRPO · 2024 – 2025

    Years
    2024 – 2025
    Team
    10 people

    My part

    • Instruction tuning plus data curation for KULLM3 and Ko-Gemma.
    • GRPO in VERL for KULLM-R with verifiable custom rewards and an adaptive length penalty.
    • Curated code and math corpora, established quality gates, and ran capability evaluations for coding and math.
    • Internal evaluations showed improved Korean reasoning and math accuracy over a Qwen3 reasoning baseline, with reduced verbosity.
04

Experience

2026.03 – Present

AI Research Engineer · LLM Evaluation & Analysis

Upstage (Solar Model Project) · Seoul, South Korea

  • Trustworthy results: Made scores reproducible and caught errors that silently changed them.
    • Found 9 of 67 benchmarks where configured sampling settings (e.g., temperature) never reached the model; made every setting explicit and enforced it with a 22-rule CI check.
    • Audited how failed requests (API errors, timeouts, judge failures) were scored across 109 benchmarks, found that half of all retry paths never actually retried, and set one team-wide rule for scoring them.
    • Caught silent scoring bugs, like an LLM judge reusing old verdicts and blank answers scored as 54.5% correct.
  • Agentic evaluation: Build and scale sandboxed agent environments and harnesses for long-horizon agentic evals (SWE-bench, Terminal-Bench, τ²-bench).
    • Caught under-elicitation: Solar ran at a 32K reasoning budget instead of 131K on 8 agentic benchmarks, so it looked weaker than it was; fixed it across 4 agent harnesses, including Claude Code and Codex.
    • Restored 10 of 13 agentic benchmarks that broke on a new checkpoint; false timeouts on one fell from 103 to 18.
  • Eval infrastructure: Maintain Upstage's eval framework: 100+ models on 100+ benchmarks across Slurm clusters.
    • Cut a full Solar Open 2 suite (~50 benchmarks) from several days to ~7 hours with an optimizer that packs benchmarks into single-node Slurm shards based on profiled throughput.
    • Tuned vLLM and SGLang serving and chat templates for Solar; standardized settings made evals 2.0× faster.
    • Restored a silently disabled batching option that was wasting 4× to 10× decoding on GPQA and AIME.
  • Model development: Worked directly on Solar Open 2 (250B MoE), Solar Pro 4, and Solar Mini 4.
    • Evaluated SFT and RL checkpoints, ran competitor baselines for the Solar Open 2 tech report, and used repeated-run ablations of sampling and serving settings to separate real gains from run-to-run noise.
    • Built Light Bench, reduced versions of 30 benchmarks (up to 98% faster) for comparing checkpoints; analyzed where light scores drift from full (noise floor, long-tail generations) and tested stratified sampling to close the gap.
    • Estimated Artificial Analysis's private AutomationBench score from public-set runs (15 models, 5.3-point RMSE).
    • Built leaderboards and comparison reports (score deltas, per-question diffs) for the training team and executives.
  • Eval logs: Built a pipeline that records every model call (evaluated model, judge, user simulator) under one schema for every benchmark in the framework, even ones that don't save trajectories.
    • Backfilled 165 runs (115K records, zero validation errors) and linked 33K agentic trajectories.
    • Added analysis that flags degeneration, API and judge failures, and scoring anomalies.
  • Agent-native tooling: Built the team's shared agent skills and a knowledge base every team member's agent loads, plus repo guidelines and CI that turned benchmark migration from a bottleneck into a checked process agents can run.
2024.01 – 2026.02

Graduate Researcher

NLP&AI Lab, Korea University · Seoul, South Korea

  • National Foundation Model Project (VAETKI, NC AI Consortium): Engineered the evaluation pipeline, standardizing 50+ benchmarks into a single reproducible runtime with automated regression tracking across checkpoints.
  • Evaluation research: Drove benchmark design (KITE) and benchmark-profiling analyses of what benchmarks actually measure, finding that most test a mix of abilities, not the single skill on their label.
  • Mechanistic interpretability: Developed SAE-based feature discovery, feature steering, and causal-intervention workflows that connect internal signals to evaluation outcomes.
  • LLM Training: Supported Korean LLM post-training and reasoning improvements.
    • GRPO in VERL for KULLM-R (nobrand/KULLM-R) with verifiable custom rewards and an adaptive length penalty.
    • Instruction tuning plus data curation for KULLM3 and Ko-Gemma.
05

Honors & Service

2026.10

Outstanding Reviewer

ACL Rolling Review · May 2026 cycle

2026.07

ARR 2026 May Reviewer

ACL Rolling Review · 6 papers

2026.06

NeurIPS 2026 Reviewer

NeurIPS · 4 papers

2026.05

ARR 2026 March Reviewer

ACL Rolling Review · 4 papers

06

Education

Korea University · M.S. in Computer Science

Graduated Feb 2026 · Seoul, KR · Advised by Prof. Heuiseok Lim · NLP&AI Lab

Focus LLM evaluation, mechanistic interpretability, and AI safety
Skills PyTorch, PEFT (LoRA, QLoRA), RL (GRPO, RLHF), Inference Optimization (vLLM, SGLang, KV Cache), Quantization (AWQ), DeepSpeed, Megatron-LM, CUDA, Docker, Kubernetes
MLOps Server admin: GPU/cluster operations, model serving, and demos

University of South Florida · B.S. in Computer Science

Graduated May 2023 · Cum Laude · Tampa, FL, USA

HPC Supported Slurm-based cluster operations; containerized GPU jobs with Docker/Singularity; profiled and optimized PyTorch/CUDA workloads
XR Built AR/VR prototypes in Unity (C#, OpenXR): gaze/gesture interactions and UI design, user studies, and demo deployments

07 · Contact

Let’s build reliable AI together.

junkim100@gmail.com