Kai Tzu-iunn Ong

Welcome to my iunniverse

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[CV] [google scholar] [LinkedIn] [​ktio89(at)yonsei(dot)ac(dot)kr]

Hello. I am Kai, from Taipei, Taiwan. I am a Ph.D. candidate in AI advised by prof. Jinyoung Yeo. ​​Before AI, I’d studied mechanical engineering at both National Taiwan University (B05) and Yonsei University. I am enthralled by the idea of building AI systems that are not merely convenient tools to replace human effort, but reliable partners that, together with humans, co-evolve and create greater societal value. Consequently, my recent research interest lies in the intersection of following subjects:

  • Things that involve humans1
  • Things that involve dialogue2
  • Things that involve societal contributions (e.g., healthcare; AI Safety)3,4


Publication Spotlight

The full publication list is here.
  1. New Towards Direct Evaluation of Harness Optimizers via Priority Ranking
    Kai Tzu-iunn Ong*, Minseok Kang*, Dongwook Choi*, Junhee Cho, and 8 more authors
    NeurIPS 2026
    [PDF]
  2. Success and Failure of Human–AI Collaboration in Clinical Reasoning: An Experimental Study on Challenging Real-world Cases
    Kai Tzu-iunn Ong*, Junwon Seo*, Hyojun Kim*, Jiwoo Kim*, and 4 more authors
    International Journal of Medical Informatics 2026 (Q1) 🎉 Best Poster Award
    [PDF]
  3. Towards Lifelong Dialogue Agents via Timeline-based Memory Management
    Kai Tzu-iunn Ong*, Namyoung Kim*, Minju Gwak, Hyungjoo Chae, and 5 more authors
    NAACL 2025 🎉 Oral Presentation
    [PDF]
  4. Large Language Models Are Clinical Reasoners: Reasoning-aware Diagnosis Framework with Prompt-generated Rationales
    Taeyoon Kwon*, Kai Tzu-iunn Ong*, Dongjin Kang, Seungjun Moon, and 6 more authors
    AAAI 2024
    [PDF]

Academic Experience

Yonsei University 2022 - Expected 2027
Ph.D. student in Artificial Intelligence
Layoff at 25 Fall for Taiwan's mandatory military service.

University of California, Irvine 2026 FW
Visiting scholar at Prof. Daye Nam's BREW lab

Yonsei University 2018 - 2022
B.Sc. in Mechanical Engineering

National Taiwan University 2016 - 2018 (Voluntarily Ceased)
B.Sc. in Mechanical Engineering
Class B05

Spoken Languages

Native:
Mandarin (traditional), Taiwanese Hokkien

Full professional proficiency (C2):
English (People often think I grew up speaking it), Korean (People often can't tell I am foreign)

Basic conversational ability (A1-2):
Japanese (Can chat for hours), Spanish (Can understand daily topics)

Baby (A0):
Thai

Activities

Conference Service:
  • Co-chair of ACL 2027 SRW.
  • Co-organiser of MuCaRD Challenge, MICCAI 2025.
Mentoring:
  • Jiyoon Kim, Hyejun Cha, Jaehoon Kim, Minwoo Oh, Seungju Kim.
  • Hyun-Jun Jang (Fall, 2026): Paper accepted to a Korean conference.
  • Youmin Sung (Fall, 2026): Paper accepted to a Korean conference (Outstanding Paper).
  • Seung Woo Baek (Spring, 2025): Paper accepted to a Korean conference.
  • Taeyoon Kwon (Fall, 2023): Papers accepted to AAAI 2024 and IOVS 2024.

Teaching (TA): Introduction to AI (AAI2250), Yonsei university (Fall, 2024); NLP (AAI3301), Yonsei university (Spring, 2024); AI expert program, Samsung, Korea (Jul, 2023 & Fall, 2024); Big data (CSI4121), Yonsei university (Spring, 2023).

Program reviewer (including secondary): ICLR (2027), Neurips (2026), AAAI (2023, 2024, 2025), ACL (2023, 2024, 2025, 2026 [Great Review]), EMNLP (2023, 2024, 2025, 2026), EACL (2024)

Conference Attendance

Upcoming:  Neurips 2027 (Australia)

Past: ICML 2026 (Korea), NAACL 2025 (USA), ACL 2024 (Thailand), EMNLP 2023 (Singapore), IEEE ISBI 2023 (Colombia), Coling 2022 (Korea)

Interest

I enjoy weight training, martial arts, and learning languages.