Hello, my name is Jaeyeon Kim! I also go with Jay. I’m currently a first-year Ph.D. student at Harvard CS, advised by Sitan Chen and Sham Kakade.

At Harvard, my research focuses on deepening our understanding of modern generative models and pioneering new paradigms for generative modeling. My recent work on Masked Diffusion received an Outstanding Paper Award at ICML!

Previously, I earned a B.S. in Math at Seoul National University, where I worked in Optimization Theory with professors Ernest Ryu and Asu Ozdaglar. Together, we developed H-duality, a novel duality framework for optimization algorithms. (1, 2, 3). Earlier in my academic journey, I won multiple awards in Math Olympiads.

I was born and raised in South Korea. When I’m not working, you’ll probably catch me outside—traveling, working out, or running. I’m quick at learning new environments, both in real life and academically: as soon as I grasp the underlying structure, I translate it into my own words and turn it into novel insights.