Hojoon Lee

Hello! I’m Hojoon Lee, a Senior Research Scientist at Holiday Robotics, where I work on physical AI for dexterous humanoid manipulation.

I received my PhD from KAIST, advised by Prof. Jaegul Choo. During my PhD, I focused on sample- and compute-efficient deep reinforcement learning, which includes SimbaV1, SimbaV2, and FlashSAC.

Beyond my academic work, I have applied reinforcement learning to robotics and games at Meta Reality Labs, Sony AI, Krafton, Kakao, and Neowiz. I also founded DAVIAN Robotics, a student-led physical AI research group built on a collaborative, interdisciplinary, hands-on culture.

If you're excited about building the best humanoids in Korea with us at Holiday Robotics, feel free to reach out.

profile photo
Publications
Selected / All

FlashDexRetarget: Accelerating Dexterous Manipulation through Multi-Motion Retargeting
Kyungmin Lee*, Sibeen Kim*, Dongyoon Hwang*, Yoonsang Oh*, Donghu Kim, Youngdo Lee, Aswin Nahrendra, Jaegul Choo†, Hojoon Lee†
Preprint

See like a Robot: Robot-Centric Pointmaps for Vision-Language-Action Models
Byungkun Lee*, Dongyoon Hwang*, Dongjin Kim, Hojoon Lee, Minho Park, Jaegul Choo
Preprint

PHUMA: Physically Reliable Humanoid Locomotion Dataset
Kyungmin Lee*, Sibeen Kim*, Youngdo Lee, Minho Park, Hyunseung Kim, Dongyoon Hwang, Donghu Kim, Hojoon Lee†, Jaegul Choo†
CoRL'26, Spotlight

3D HAMSTER: Hierarchical VLAs through 3D Trajectory Guidance
Dongyoon Hwang*, Byungkun Lee*, Dongjin Kim, Hyojin Jang, Hoiyeong Jin, Jueun Mun, Minho Park, Hojoon Lee, Hyunseung Kim, Jaegul Choo
IROS'26

RDA: Reward Design Agent for Reinforcement Learning
Hojoon Lee, Ajay Subramanian, Ben Abbatematteo, Pedro Matias, Vijay Veerabadran, Karl Ridgeway, Nitin Kamra
RLC'26

FlashSAC: Fast and Stable Off-Policy RL for High-Dimensional Robot Control
Donghu Kim*, Youngdo Lee*, Minho Park, Kinam Kim, Takuma Seno, Aswin Nahrendra, Sehee Min, Daniel Palenicek, Florian Vogt, Danica Kragic, Jan Peters, Jaegul Choo†, Hojoon Lee†
RSS'26, Outstanding Paper Award 🏆

ACG: Action Coherence Guidance for Flow-based VLA models
Minho Park*, Kinam Kim*, Junha Hyung, Hyojin Jang, Hoiyeong Jin, Jooyeol Yun, Hojoon Lee†, Jaegul Choo†
ICRA'26

FIRE: Frobenius-Isometry Reinitialization for Balancing Stability-Plasticity Tradeoff
Isaac Han, Sangyeon Park, Seungwon Oh, Donghu Kim, Hojoon Lee†, Kyungjoon Kim†
ICLR'26, Oral

Maintaining Plasticity for Scalable Deep Reinforcement Learning
Committee: Jaegul Choo, Chulhee Yun, Kimin Lee, Clare Lyle, Peter Stone
Thesis

A Champion‑level Vision‑based RL Agent for Competitive Racing in Gran Turismo 7
Hojoon Lee*, Takuma Seno*, Jun Jet Tai*, Kaushik Subramanian, Kenta Kawamoto, Peter R. Wurman, Peter Stone
IEEE RA-L & ICRA'26
preprint2025simbav2

SimbaV2: Hyperspherical Normalization for Scalable Deep Reinforcement Learning
Hojoon Lee*, Youngdo Lee*, Takuma Seno, Donghu Kim, Peter Stone, Jaegul Choo
ICML'25, Spotlight

SimBa: Simplicity Bias for Scaling Up Parameters in Deep Reinforcement Learning
Hojoon Lee*, Dongyoon Hwang*, Donghu Kim, Hyunseung Kim, Jun Jet Tai, Kaushik Subramanian, Peter R. Wurman, Jaegul Choo, Peter Stone, Takuma Seno
ICLR'25, Spotlight
neurips2024dodont

Do's and Don'ts: Learning Desirable Skills with Instruction Videos
Hyunseung Kim, Byungkun Lee, Hojoon Lee, Dongyoon Hwang, Donghu Kim, Jaegul Choo
NeurIPS'24
icml2024hnt

Slow and Steady Wins the Race: Maintaining Plasticity with Hare and Tortoise Networks
Hojoon Lee, Hyeonseo Cho, Hyunseung Kim, Donghu Kim, Dugki Min, Jaegul Choo, Clare Lyle
ICML'24
icml2024atari-pb

ATARI-PB: Investigating Pre-Training Objectives for Generalization in Vision-Based RL
Donghu Kim*, Hojoon Lee*, Kyungmin Lee*, Dongyoon Hwang, Jaegul Choo
ICML'24
icml2024coin

Adapting Pretrained ViTs with Convolution Injector for Visuo-Motor Control
Dongyoon Hwang*, Byungkun Lee*, Hojoon Lee, Hyunseung Kim, Jaegul Choo
ICML'24
neurips2023plastic

PLASTIC: Improving Input and Label Plasticity for Sample Efficient Reinforcement Learning
Hojoon Lee*, Hanseul Cho*, Hyunseung Kim*, Daehoon Gwak, Joonkee Kim, Jaegul Choo, Se-Young Yun, Chulhee Yun
NeurIPS'23

DISCO-DANCE: Learning to Discover Skills through Guidance
Hyunseung Kim*, Byungkun Lee*, Hojoon Lee, Dongyoon Hwang, Jaegul Choo
NeurIPS'23
icml2023simtpr

SimTPR: On the Importance of Feature Decorrelation for Unsupervised Representation Learning for Reinforcement Learning
Hojoon Lee, Koanho Lee, Dongyoon Hwang, Hyunho Lee, Byungkun Lee, Jaegul Choo
ICML'23
sigir2022irs

Towards Validating Long-Term User Feedbacks in Interactive Recommender System
Hojoon Lee, Dongyoon Hwang, Kyushik Min, Jaegul Choo
SIGIR'22 (short), Honorable Mention Award 🥈
www2022draftrec

DraftRec: Personalized Draft Recommendation for Winning in MOBA Games
Hojoon Lee*, Dongyoon Hwang*, Hyunseung Kim, Byungkun Lee, Jaegul Choo
WWW'22
Work Experience
Holiday Robotics Jan 2026 – Present
Senior Research Scientist Seoul, Korea
  • Dexterous Manipulation
Meta Reality Labs May 2025 – Nov 2025
Research Intern Seattle, USA
Krafton AI Feb 2025 – May 2025
Research Intern Seoul, Korea
Sony AI Feb 2024 – Aug 2024
Research Intern Tokyo, Japan
Kakao Enterprise Sep 2021 – Nov 2021
Research Intern Pangyo, Korea
Neowiz Mar 2019 – Jun 2019
Research Intern Pangyo, Korea