Jinho Choo

Jinho Choo, Yeong-Dae Kwon, Jihoon Kim et al.

Neural approaches for combinatorial optimization (CO) equip a learning mechanism to discover powerful heuristics for solving complex real-world problems. While neural approaches capable of high-quality solutions in a single shot are emerging, state-of-the-art approaches are often unable to take full advantage of the solving time available to them. In contrast, hand-crafted heuristics perform highly effective search well and exploit the computation time given to them, but contain heuristics that are difficult to adapt to a dataset being solved. With the goal of providing a powerful search procedure to neural CO approaches, we propose simulation-guided beam search (SGBS), which examines candidate solutions within a fixed-width tree search that both a neural net-learned policy and a simulation (rollout) identify as promising. We further hybridize SGBS with efficient active search (EAS), where SGBS enhances the quality of solutions backpropagated in EAS, and EAS improves the quality of the policy used in SGBS. We evaluate our methods on well-known CO benchmarks and show that SGBS significantly improves the quality of the solutions found under reasonable runtime assumptions.

Junhee Cho, Jihoon Kim, Daseul Bae et al.

Software robots have long been used in Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to automate mundane and repetitive computer tasks. With the advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) and their advanced reasoning capabilities, these agents are now able to handle more complex or previously unseen tasks. However, LLM-based automation techniques in recent literature frequently rely on HTML source code for input or application-specific API calls for actions, limiting their applicability to specific environments. We propose an LLM-based agent that mimics human behavior in solving computer tasks. It perceives its environment solely through screenshot images, which are then converted into text for an LLM to process. By leveraging the reasoning capability of the LLM, we eliminate the need for large-scale human demonstration data typically required for model training. The agent only executes keyboard and mouse operations on Graphical User Interface (GUI), removing the need for pre-provided APIs to function. To further enhance the agent's performance in this setting, we propose a novel prompting strategy called Context-Aware Action Planning (CAAP) prompting, which enables the agent to thoroughly examine the task context from multiple perspectives. Our agent achieves an average success rate of 94.5% on MiniWoB++ and an average task score of 62.3 on WebShop, outperforming all previous studies of agents that rely solely on screen images. This method demonstrates potential for broader applications, particularly for tasks requiring coordination across multiple applications on desktops or smartphones, marking a significant advancement in the field of automation agents. Codes and models are accessible at https://github.com/caap-agent/caap-agent.

Jin-woo Lee, Junhwa Choi, Bongkyu Hwang et al.

We revisit continual pre-training for large language models and argue that progress now depends more on scaling the right structure than on scaling parameters alone. We introduce SCALE, a width upscaling architecture that inserts lightweight expansion into linear modules while freezing all pre-trained parameters. This preserves the residual and attention topologies and increases capacity without perturbing the base model's original functionality. SCALE is guided by two principles: Persistent Preservation, which maintains the base model's behavior via preservation-oriented initialization and freezing of the pre-trained weights, and Collaborative Adaptation, which selectively trains a subset of expansion components to acquire new knowledge with minimal interference. We instantiate these ideas as SCALE-Preserve (preservation-first), SCALE-Adapt (adaptation-first), and SCALE-Route, an optional routing extension that performs token-level routing between preservation and adaptation heads. On a controlled synthetic biography benchmark, SCALE mitigates the severe forgetting observed with depth expansion while still acquiring new knowledge. In continual pre-training on a Korean corpus, SCALE variants achieve less forgetting on English evaluations and competitive gains on Korean benchmarks, with these variants offering the best overall stability-plasticity trade-off. Accompanying analysis clarifies when preservation provably holds and why the interplay between preservation and adaptation stabilizes optimization compared to standard continual learning setups.

Jinho Choo, JunSeung Lee, Jimyeong Kim et al.

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate strong multilingual capabilities, yet often fail to consistently generate responses in the intended language, exhibiting a phenomenon known as language confusion. Prior mitigation approaches based on sequence-level fine-tuning, such as DPO, ORPO, and GRPO, operate at the level of entire responses and can lead to unintended degradation of general model capabilities, motivating the need for more fine-grained alternatives. To address this, we introduce Token-Level Policy Optimization (TLPO), a fine-tuning framework designed to mitigate language confusion through localized, token-level updates. TLPO identifies error-prone positions, explores alternative candidate tokens, and updates the policy using a tailored objective to suppress error-inducing outputs at a granular level. This selective intervention enables effective mitigation of language confusion without compromising the model's general abilities. Experiments on multiple multilingual LLMs across diverse languages demonstrate that TLPO significantly outperforms baselines in improving language consistency while preserving downstream task accuracy.

Jeongwoo Jae, Jeonghoon Hong, Jinho Choo et al.

Learning quantum states is a crucial task for realizing quantum information technology. Recently, neural approaches have emerged as promising methods for learning quantum states. We propose a meta-learning model that utilizes reinforcement learning (RL) to optimize the process of learning quantum states. To improve the data efficiency of the RL, we introduce an action repetition strategy inspired by curriculum learning. The RL agent significantly improves the sample efficiency of learning random quantum states, and achieves infidelity scaling close to the Heisenberg limit. We also show that the RL agent trained using 3-qubit states can generalize to learning up to 5-qubit states. These results highlight the utility of RL-driven meta-learning to enhance the efficiency and generalizability of learning quantum states. Our approach can be applied to improve quantum control, quantum optimization, and quantum machine learning.

Yeong-Dae Kwon, Jinho Choo, Iljoo Yoon et al.

Machine Learning (ML) can help solve combinatorial optimization (CO) problems better. A popular approach is to use a neural net to compute on the parameters of a given CO problem and extract useful information that guides the search for good solutions. Many CO problems of practical importance can be specified in a matrix form of parameters quantifying the relationship between two groups of items. There is currently no neural net model, however, that takes in such matrix-style relationship data as an input. Consequently, these types of CO problems have been out of reach for ML engineers. In this paper, we introduce Matrix Encoding Network (MatNet) and show how conveniently it takes in and processes parameters of such complex CO problems. Using an end-to-end model based on MatNet, we solve asymmetric traveling salesman (ATSP) and flexible flow shop (FFSP) problems as the earliest neural approach. In particular, for a class of FFSP we have tested MatNet on, we demonstrate a far superior empirical performance to any methods (neural or not) known to date.

Byoungjip Kim, Jinho Choo, Yeong-Dae Kwon et al.

This paper introduces SelfMatch, a semi-supervised learning method that combines the power of contrastive self-supervised learning and consistency regularization. SelfMatch consists of two stages: (1) self-supervised pre-training based on contrastive learning and (2) semi-supervised fine-tuning based on augmentation consistency regularization. We empirically demonstrate that SelfMatch achieves the state-of-the-art results on standard benchmark datasets such as CIFAR-10 and SVHN. For example, for CIFAR-10 with 40 labeled examples, SelfMatch achieves 93.19% accuracy that outperforms the strong previous methods such as MixMatch (52.46%), UDA (70.95%), ReMixMatch (80.9%), and FixMatch (86.19%). We note that SelfMatch can close the gap between supervised learning (95.87%) and semi-supervised learning (93.19%) by using only a few labels for each class.

Yeong-Dae Kwon, Jinho Choo, Byoungjip Kim et al.

In neural combinatorial optimization (CO), reinforcement learning (RL) can turn a deep neural net into a fast, powerful heuristic solver of NP-hard problems. This approach has a great potential in practical applications because it allows near-optimal solutions to be found without expert guides armed with substantial domain knowledge. We introduce Policy Optimization with Multiple Optima (POMO), an end-to-end approach for building such a heuristic solver. POMO is applicable to a wide range of CO problems. It is designed to exploit the symmetries in the representation of a CO solution. POMO uses a modified REINFORCE algorithm that forces diverse rollouts towards all optimal solutions. Empirically, the low-variance baseline of POMO makes RL training fast and stable, and it is more resistant to local minima compared to previous approaches. We also introduce a new augmentation-based inference method, which accompanies POMO nicely. We demonstrate the effectiveness of POMO by solving three popular NP-hard problems, namely, traveling salesman (TSP), capacitated vehicle routing (CVRP), and 0-1 knapsack (KP). For all three, our solver based on POMO shows a significant improvement in performance over all recent learned heuristics. In particular, we achieve the optimality gap of 0.14% with TSP100 while reducing inference time by more than an order of magnitude.

Jongwon Choi, Kwang Moo Yi, Jihoon Kim et al.

Active Learning for discriminative models has largely been studied with the focus on individual samples, with less emphasis on how classes are distributed or which classes are hard to deal with. In this work, we show that this is harmful. We propose a method based on the Bayes' rule, that can naturally incorporate class imbalance into the Active Learning framework. We derive that three terms should be considered together when estimating the probability of a classifier making a mistake for a given sample; i) probability of mislabelling a class, ii) likelihood of the data given a predicted class, and iii) the prior probability on the abundance of a predicted class. Implementing these terms requires a generative model and an intractable likelihood estimation. Therefore, we train a Variational Auto Encoder (VAE) for this purpose. To further tie the VAE with the classifier and facilitate VAE training, we use the classifiers' deep feature representations as input to the VAE. By considering all three probabilities, among them especially the data imbalance, we can substantially improve the potential of existing methods under limited data budget. We show that our method can be applied to classification tasks on multiple different datasets -- including one that is a real-world dataset with heavy data imbalance -- significantly outperforming the state of the art.