Phillip Y. Lee | KAIST AI

About Me

I am Phillip (Yuseung) Lee, a second year PhD student at KAIST Graduate School of AI, advised by Prof. Minhyuk Sung. I am also a student researcher at Google DeepMind, Mountain View. I received both my Masters and Bachelors degree at KAIST. I am also fortunate to closely collaborate with Prof. Leonidas Guibas. I am a recipient of Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship Korea 2025.

My research interests revolve around analyzing and enhancing the spatial understanding of multimodal foundation models, with the broader goal of building truly autonomous and embodied agents capable of operating in the physical world. Specifically, I have worked on advancing the 3D spatial reasoning capabilities of vision-language models (VLMs), and enhancing the spatial control of diffusion models.

I am open to collaboration opportunities! Please feel free to contact me via email. My CV is at Curriculum Vitae (CV).

Work Experience

Student Researcher, Google DeepMind (Mountain View, CA)
May 2026 - Current (Host: Leonidas Guibas)

News

[May. 2026] I joined Google DeepMind (Mountain View) as a Student Researcher, hosted by Leonidas Guibas.
[Feb. 2026] Token Warping is accepted to CVPR 2026.
[Feb. 2026] I am co-hosting the 2nd Workshop on Multimodal Spatial Intelligence (MUSI) at CVPR 2026.
[Nov. 2025] I won the Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship Korea 2025 with our APC (ICCV 2025) paper.
[Sep. 2025] Unconditional Priors is accepted to WACV 2026.
[Jun. 2025] Perspective-Aware Reasoning (APC) is accepted to ICCV 2025.
[Nov. 2024] I successfully defended my Masters thesis on "Spatial Grounding with Pretrained Image Diffusion Models". Slides are available here.
[Oct. 2024] I gave an oral presentation on ReGround at U&ME Workshop in ECCV 2024. Slides are available here.
[Sep. 2024] GrounDiT is accepted to NeurIPS 2024.
[Jul. 2024] ReGround is accepted to ECCV 2024.
[May. 2024] SyncDiffusion is featured in KAIST Annual R&D Report as a Research Highlight of 2023.
[Dec. 2023] I gave a spotlight presentation on SyncDiffusion at ML4CD Workshop in NeurIPS 2023 and also presented at Workshop on Diffusion Models. Slides are available here.
[Sep. 2023] SyncDiffusion is accepted to NeurIPS 2023.
[Aug. 2023] Started Master's Progam at KAIST Graduate School of AI. (Advisor: Prof. Minhyuk Sung)

[ see more ]

Publications

Selected All

CVPR

Token Warping Helps MLLMs Look from Nearby Viewpoints

Phillip Y. Lee*, Chanho Park*, Mingue Park, Seungwoo Yoo, Juil Koo, Minhyuk Sung (* equal contribution)

CVPR 2026

Project arXiv

Preprint

Toward Ambulatory Vision: Learning Visually-Grounded Active View Selection

Juil Koo*, Daehyeon Choi*, Sangwoo Youn*, Phillip Y. Lee, Minhyuk Sung (* equal contribution)

Preprint, 2025

Project PDF arXiv

Preprint

DiverseVAR: Balancing Diversity and Quality of Next-Scale Visual Autoregressive Models

Mingue Park*, Prin Phunyaphibarn*, Phillip Y. Lee, Minhyuk Sung

AI for Creative Visual Content Generation, Editing and Understanding (CVEU) Workshop at CVPR 2026

arXiv

WACV

Unconditional Priors Matter! Improving Conditional Generation of Fine-Tuned Diffusion Models

Prin Phunyaphibarn, Phillip Y. Lee, Jaihoon Kim, Minhyuk Sung

WACV 2026

Project PDF arXiv

ICCV

Perspective-Aware Reasoning in Vision-Language Models via Mental Imagery Simulation

Phillip Y. Lee, Jihyeon Je, Chanho Park, Mikaela Angelina Uy, Leonidas Guibas, Minhyuk Sung

ICCV 2025, Human to Robot (H2R) Workshop at CoRL 2025

Project PDF arXiv

NeurIPS

GrounDiT: Grounding Diffusion Transformers via Noisy Patch Transplantation

Phillip Y. Lee*, Taehoon Yoon*, Minhyuk Sung
(* equal contribution)
NeurIPS 2024

Project PDF arXiv

ECCV

ReGround: Improving Textual and Spatial Grounding at No Cost

Phillip Y. Lee, Minhyuk Sung

ECCV 2024

Project PDF arXiv BibTex Slides

NeurIPS

SyncDiffusion: Coherent Montage via Synchronized Joint Diffusions

Phillip Y. Lee, Kunho Kim, Hyunjin Kim, Minhyuk Sung

NeurIPS 2023

Project PDF arXiv Code BibTex Demo Talk

Teaching

Teaching Assistant, Fall 2025, Diffusion and Flow Models (CS492-C), KAIST
Teaching Assistant, Spring 2025, Machine Learning for 3D Data (CS479), KAIST
Teaching Assistant, Fall 2024, Diffusion Models and Their Applications (CS492-D), KAIST
Teaching Assistant, Fall 2023, Machine Learning for 3D Data (CS479), KAIST

Academic Services

Reviewer: NeurIPS (2024, 2025), ICLR (2025, 2026), ICML (2025), ICCV Workshop (SP4V, 2025), 3DV (2026), AAAI (2026), TPAMI (2025), Eurographics (2026)
Workshop Organizer: 2nd Workshop on Multimodal Spatial Intelligence (MUSI) at CVPR 2026

Achievements

Recipient of Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship Korea 2025
Gold Reviewer of ICML2 2026