I am a first-year Ph.D. student at Seoul National University, working with Prof. Gunhee Kim. I am also a visiting researcher at Stanford University, hosted by Prof. Chelsea Finn. Previously, I received my Bachelor's degree with honors in Computer Science and Engineering at POSTECH.

Throughout my life, I’ve been thinking about what I want, what I know, and how to explore what I do not know. This curiosity has grown into the research question I want to pursue: how should models interact with external knowledge? I want to explore what should be memorized versus externalized, how models retrieve and reason over external knowledge, and how memory should be organized. These interests draw me to information retrieval, RAG, and agent memory.

In parallel, I enjoy abstracting thoughts and mapping their relationships into my own language. For me, conversation serves as a medium for interpreting others’ mental models and discovering new axes of thinking. You can find more of these reflections on my Blog.

Education

Stanford University May 2026–Present

Visiting Student Researcher at IRIS Lab

Seoul National University Sep 2025–Present

M.S/Ph.D in AI

Pohang University of Science and Technology Feb 2021–Aug 2025

B.S. in Computer Science and Engineering

Summa Cum Laude

Hansung Science High School for the Gifted Mar 2018–Feb 2021

Publication

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
Arxiv

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

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