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Youngjune Lee

I am a Machine Learning Engineer at NAVER and an incoming Ph.D. student in Computer Science and Engineering at Korea University (starting Sep 2026), where I will be advised by SeongKu Kang. I received my M.S from KAIST, where I was advised by Kee-Eung Kim. Feel free to send me an e-mail if you want to have a chat.

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  • Information retrieval and recommender systems for real-world applications

Sparse and Dense Retrievers Learn Better Together: Joint Sparse-Dense Optimization for Text-Image Retrieval
Jonghyun Song, Youngjune Lee, Gyu-Hwung Cho, Ilhyeon Song, Saehun Kim and Yohan Jo
CIKM 2025 - Short Research Paper Track

Joint training of sparse and dense text-image retriever


IRA: Adaptive Interest-aware Representation and Alignment for Personalized Multi-interest Retrieval
Youngjune Lee*, Haeyu Jeong*, Changgeon Lim, Jeong Choi, Hongjun Lim, Hangon Kim, Jiyoon Kwon, Saehun Kim
SIGIR 2025 - Industry Track

Personalization with text-based multiple user-vector retrieval


RRADistill: Distilling LLMs' Passage Ranking Ability for Long-Tail Queries Document Re-Ranking on a Search Engine
Nayoung Choi*, Youngjune Lee*, Gyu-Hwung Cho, Haeyu Jeong, Jungmin Kong, Saehun Kim, Keunchan Park, Sarah Cho, Inchang Jeong, Gyohee Nam, Sunghoon Han, Wonil Yang and Jaeho Choi
EMNLP 2024 - Industry Track

Reranking for long-tail queries


MvFS: Multi-view Feature Selection for Recommender System
Youngjune Lee, Yeongjong Jeong, Keunchan Park and SeongKu Kang
CIKM 2023 - Short Research Paper Track

Optimize key features from each data instance in Recommender System


Learning to Embed Multi-Modal Contexts for Situated Conversational Agents
Haeju Lee*, Oh Joon Kwon*, Yunseon Choi*, Minho Park, Ran Han, Yoonhyung Kim, Jinhyeon Kim, Youngjune Lee, Haebin Shin, Kangwook Lee, and Kee-Eung Kim
NAACL 2022 - Findings

Improving transformer's joint-training architecture for Multi-Modal Dialogue system using VR-based shopping dataset


Tackling Situated Multi-Modal Task-Oriented Dialogs with a Single Transformer Model
Haeju Lee*, Oh Joon Kwon*, Yunseon Choi*, Jinhyeon Kim, Youngjune Lee, Ran Han, Yoonhyung Kim, Minho Park, Kangwook Lee, Haebin Shin and Kee-Eung Kim
DSTC10 Workshop at AAAI 2022

MIulti-Modal Dialogue system


Dual Correction Strategy for Ranking Distillation in Top-N Recommender System
Youngjune Lee and Kee-Eung Kim
CIKM 2021 - Short Research Paper Track

Distillation focused on the parts that are particularly difficult to follow using discrepancy on both the user side and the item side of the teacher model and the student model


Augment & Valuate : A Data Enhancement Pipeline for Data-Centric AI
Youngjune Lee, Oh Joon Kwon, Haeju Lee, Joonyoung Kim, Kangwook Lee and Kee-Eung Kim
Data Centric AI Workshop at NeurIPS 2021.

Development of a data quality improvement pipeline, that utilizes augmentation and hard negative dataset extraction and modification, to improve image classification performance with only a small dataset



Machine Learning Engineer | NAVER

Ranking & Personalization for Search and Recommendation

Jan 2022 - Present

Software Engineer | TmaxData
Feb 2019 - Feb 2020


Ph.D in Computer Science and Engineering | Korea University
Sep 2026 - Present

  • Advisor: Prof. SeongKu Kang
M.S in Software Graduate Program | KAIST
Mar 2020 - Feb 2022

  • Advisor: Prof. Kee-Eung Kim
B.S in Mathematics | Hanyang University
Mar 2012 - Feb 2019

  • Leave of absence for mandatory military service: Jul 2014 - Jul 2016

  • 3rd Rank @ NAVER R&D Award, NAVER, 2024
  • Winner @ DSTC10-Track3 Competition, Facebook Research, 2021
  • 6th Rank & Honorable Mention @ Data-Centric Competition, DeepLearning.AI, 2021
  • Student Travel Award, ACM SIGIR, 2021
  • LG Electronics Industry Scholarship, LG Electronics, 2020
  • Bonsol Kim Jong-han Scholarship, Bonsol Kim Jong-han Scholarship Foundation, 2018
  • National Science and Technology Scholarship, Ministry of Education in Korea 2012



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