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 Simba series:1,2 and FlashSAC.

Beyond my academic work, I have applied reinforcement learning to robotics and games, including dexterous manipulation at Meta Reality Labs, vision-based racing agents in Gran Turismo at Sony AI, chess-playing language models at Krafton, recommender systems at Kakao, and game agents for Browndust at Neowiz.

During this time, I founded Davian Robotics, a student-led physical AI research group built on a collaborative, interdisciplinary, hands-on culture.

If you're interested in building the best humanoids in Korea, feel free to reach out.

Email  /  CV  /  Google Scholar  /  LinkedIn  /  Twitter  /  Github

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Publications
Selected / All
preprint2025phuma

PHUMA: Physically-Grounded Humanoid Locomotion Dataset
Kyungmin Lee, Sibeen Kim, Minho Park, Hyunseung Kim, Dongyoon Hwang, Hojoon Lee, Jaegul Choo.
Preprint.
project page / arXiv / code


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.
project page / arXiv


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


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.
project page / arXiv / code

preprint2025acg

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.
project page / arXiv / code


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


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

neurips2024dodont

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.
arXiv / video

preprint2025simbav2

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

iclr2025simba

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
project page / arXiv / code

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.
project page / arXiv

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.
arXiv / poster / Bibtex

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.
project page / arXiv / poster / Bibtex

icml2024coin

Adapting Pretrained ViTs with Convolution Injector for Visuo-Motor Control
Dongyoon Hwang*, Byungkun Lee*, Hojoon Lee, Hyunseung Kim, Jaegul Choo.
ICML'24.
project page / arXiv / Bibtex

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.
arXiv / code / slide / poster / Bibtex

neurips2023disco-dance

DISCO-DANCE: Learning to Discover Skills through Guidance
Hyunseung Kim*, Byungkun Lee*, Hojoon Lee, Dongyoon Hwang, Jaegul Choo.
NeurIPS'23.
project page / arXiv / code / Bibtex

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.
arXiv / code / poster / Bibtex

sigir2022irs

Towards Validating Long-Term User Feedbacks in Interactive Recommender System
Hojoon Lee, Dongyoon Hwang, Kyushik Min, Jaegul Choo.
SIGIR'22 (short), Honorable Mention
arXiv / poster / Bibtex

www2022draftrec

DraftRec: Personalized Draft Recommendation for Winning in MOBA Games
Hojoon Lee*, Dongyoon Hwang*, Hyunseung Kim, Byungkun Lee, Jaegul Choo.
WWW'22.
arXiv / code / poster / Bibtex


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

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