Sohyeon Kim

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sohyeon@stanford.edu
sohyeon.kim@vision.snu.ac.kr

I am a visiting researcher at Stanford University, working with Prof. Chelsea Finn. I am also a second-year PhD student at Seoul National University, advised by Prof. Gunhee Kim.

I have always been drawn to what I know, what I do not, and how to explore the gap between them. This leads me to ask how models can use external knowledge to solve increasingly challenging problems. I believe we already have plenty of knowledge to draw on, especially the knowledge that keeps evolving and accumulating. We need memory systems that models can manage on their own, so they can reuse prior knowledge instead of reasoning from scratch and avoid repeating past failures.

Retrieving such knowledge is hard with existing methods, since it rarely looks similar on the surface. Still, humans (especially domain experts) intuitively know where to look in a vast search space and find connections that seem obvious only in hindsight, a kind of research taste explored in ScholarCatalyst. I aim to build models that find such connections for better decision making in open-ended, long-horizon problems.

I enjoy thinking and reading about research and beyond. You can find my thoughts on my Blog and Research Philosophy.

Research

Stanford AI Lab
Research Intuition as a Retrieval Task
Sohyeon Kim and Yoonho Lee
November 2026  SAIL Blog Post

ScholarCatalyst: A Benchmark for Retrieving Papers that Inspire New Research
Sohyeon Kim*, Yoonho Lee*, Bo Liu, Dayoon Ko, Rulin Shao, Seungone Kim, Graham Neubig, Pang Wei Koh, Aakanksha Chowdhery, Akari Asai, Omar Khattab, Yejin Choi, Gunhee Kim, Chelsea Finn
Preprint 2026  Website  Paper  Code  Data  *equal contribution
Selected for Laude Institute's Slingshots // FOUR

Selected for Laude Institute's Slingshots // FOUR ScholarCatalyst task overview: inspiring papers can be semantically dissimilar while topically related papers may not advance a project.

MULTI3IR: A Benchmark for Multi-perspective Multi-domain Multi-modal Information Retrieval
Seokwon Song, Sohyeon Kim, Gunhee Kim
EMNLP 2026  Paper

When Is Enough Not Enough? Illusory Completion in Search Agents
Dayoon Ko, Jihyuk Kim, Sohyeon Kim, Haeju Park, Dahyun Lee, Gunhee Kim, Moontae Lee, Kyungjae Lee
COLM 2026 Workshop on Agent Behavior  Paper

Hybrid Deep Searcher: Scalable Parallel and Sequential Search Reasoning
Dayoon Ko, Jihyuk Kim, Haeju Park, Sohyeon Kim, Dahyun Lee, Yongrae Jo, Gunhee Kim, Moontae Lee, Kyungjae Lee
ICLR 2026  Paper  Website

When Should Dense Retrievers Be Updated in Evolving Corpora? Detecting Out-of-Distribution Corpora Using GradNormIR
Dayoon Ko, Jinyoung Kim, Sohyeon Kim, Jinhyuk Kim, Jaehoon Lee, Seonghak Song, Minyoung Lee, Gunhee Kim
ACL 2025 Findings  Paper