Taehyun Cho

I am a Vector Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow at the Vector Institute and a Principles of Intelligence Postdoctoral Fellow at the Fields Institute, hosted by Prof. Tim G. J. Rudner of the University of Toronto. I am also a postdoctoral fellow at Seoul National University, supported by the Sejong Science Fellowship of the National Research Foundation of Korea, where I received my Ph.D. under Prof. Jungwoo Lee. I hold a B.S. in Mathematics from Korea University.

Researcher Person

Personal Interest

Strategic Games:
Having peaked at server rank #9 in Teamfight Tactics (TFT) during a competitive season, I treat strategic games as experimental laboratories for studying decision-making under uncertainty. Competitive multi-agent environments like TFT require continuous adaptation, opponent modeling, and risk-sensitive planning. By analyzing my own high-level gameplay, I study how strategies are formed and adjusted in response to stochastic dynamics and strategic interaction. I am particularly interested in formalizing how these strategies emerge in competitive settings and translating these principles into reinforcement learning agents.

Behavioral Economics and Cognitive Science:
Behavioral economics and cognitive science play a central role in how I think about human decision-making. Many reinforcement learning formulations focus primarily on maximizing expected return, abstracting away inference-time constraints and bounded rationality. I am interested in understanding how human biases, risk perception, and cognitive limitations shape actual decisions. This perspective motivates my research on modeling human-aligned decision processes that go beyond expectation maximization and instead account for uncertainty, regret, and subjective evaluation of outcomes.

Philosophy:
Since 2020, I have been part of a regular philosophy gathering called "Sunday Salon." Our dialogues, initially inspired by French "Baccalauréat" topics, have expanded to address AI and its societal implications. These discussions have shaped my thinking on human uniqueness, responsibility, and subjective fulfillment. I am focused on understanding which aspects of human reasoning (such as regret, narrative self-reflection, and emotional responses) remain difficult to formalize, and how they might inform the development of human-aligned AI systems.

Aug 2026 — I received a research Grant from Grantmaking.ai for the project Faithful Preference Learning: Cognitively-Aligned Post-Training.

July 2026 — I gave a talk at the RIKEN-AIP · Vector · NAIRL Workshop on A Regret Minimization Framework on Preference Learning in Large Language Models.

July 2026 — I gave a talk at the Cortiq Summit on A Regret Minimization Framework on Preference Learning in Large Language Models, awarded by SK Inc. AX.

June 2026 — I will join the Vector Institute as a Vector Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow, starting August 2026.

May 2026 — I received the INMC Young Researcher Award from the Institute of New Media and Communications, Seoul National University.

May 2026 — I received the Gold Reviewer Award (Top 25%) at ICML 2026.

May 2026 — Our paper A Regret Minimization Framework on Preference Learning in Large Language Models was accepted at ICML 2026 as a Spotlight (Top 2.2%).

May 2026 — Our paper MVP-LAM: Learning Action-Centric Latent Action via Cross-Viewpoint Reconstruction was accepted at ICML 2026.

Apr 2026 — I gave a Vector Visitor Research Talk at the Vector Institute on Rethinking Human Feedback: A Regret Minimization Perspective on Preference Learning.

Apr 2026 — I gave a talk at the SNU AI Summit on Policy-labeled Preference Learning: Is Preference Enough for RLHF?

Mar 2026 — I was selected for the Fields Institute - Principles of Intelligence Postdoctoral Fellowship.

Feb 2026 — I was selected for the Sejong Science Fellowship for the project Distributional Regret Analysis for Human-Aligned Interactive Agentic AI under High Uncertainty.

Feb 2026 — I received my Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Seoul National University and was honored with the Distinguished Dissertation Award.