Mingyu Park

I'm a Master's student of Robotics program at KAIST in South Korea, advised by Prof. Donghwan Lee.

My research goal is to build real‑world robots that can perform precise control tasks with human‑level cognitive and generalizable abilities. I’m especially interested in developing practical methods and understanding underlying foundations for sequential decision‑making problems. My current mission toward this goal is to devise a general method for learning a unified policy that can generalize to diverse tasks, environments, and embodiments.

Research interest

Formally, my research interest interleaves between offline reinforcement learning, self‑supervised learning, and foundation models. I'm also interested in research topics about physical intelligence that may enable robots to understand the underlying physical rules of the real-world.

Recent News 📣

(Feb, 2025) I finally graduated the Master's degree with the robotics program at KAIST!

(May, 2024) I attended to ICRA in Yokohama, Japan!

(Aug., 2023) I participated in Elite Summer School in Odense, Denmark!

Publications

Combining recipes from the model-free visual RL literature with a model-based RL backbone achieves superior sample efficiency and visual generalization across diverse visual RL environments.

Pretraining a shared $Q$-network with a supervised regression task significantly improves the performance of existing offline RL methods, demonstrating an average improvement of 135.94% on the D4RL benchmark.

Reduced hierarchical quadratic programming (rHQP) is an optimal real-time controller for articulated redundant dual-arm manipulators. rHQP solves about x2.44 faster than the conventional HQP on average.

Education

Kwangwoon University (Mar. 2017 - Feb. 2023)

B.S. in Robotics Engineering
Military service (Mar. 2018 - Nov. 2019)

KAIST(Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology) (Mar. 2023 - Feb. 2025)

M.S. in Robotics Program
Thesis: Model-based Reinforcement Learning with Improved Observational Generalization.

Work experiences

KIST (Jun. 2021 - Dec. 2021)

Undergraduate Research Assistant advised by Dr. Yisoo Lee.
Implemented an optimal control system of the fixed‑base redundant dual‑arm manipulators.

SNU (Seoul National University) (Jan. 2022 - Oct. 2022)

Undergraduate Research intern advised by Prof. Jaeheung Park.
Researched a mobile robot navigation system using SLAM and extended Kalman filter.

Check details at project page!

Extracurricular activities

BARAM (Academic Robotics Club) (Mar. 2020 - Dec. 2022)

Designed and taught an academic seminar regarding robotics, including computer vision and control engineering.
Participated in a semester-long project that crafted a novel robot from scratch and oversaw each project for incoming Kwangwoon students.
Served as a club director for members by organizing an annual exhibition of hand-crafted robots.

Check details at project page!

International Elite Summer School in Robotics & Entrepreneurship (Aug. 2023).

Participated in the summer school to have a better academic knowledge of robotics, regarding advanced techniques for designing robotic systems and entrepreneurship in robotic startup companies (e.g. Universal Robots) in Denmark.
Enlarged an international network with peer students engaging in robotic innovation from diverse countries

Awards & Honors

Awards

Kwangwoon Dream

Half tuition of admission scholarship for undergraduate study (SP & FA 2017).

Academic Excellence Scholarship

Quarter tuition for undergraduate study (FA 2020).

Full tuition for undergraduate study (SP 2021).

Half tuition for undergraduate study (FA 2021).

Half tuition for undergraduate study (FA 2022).

KAIST Support Scholarship

Full tuition and living expenses support for graduate study (2023 - 2025).

Honors

Dean's List

Academic excellence honor for undergraduate study (FA 2020).

Academic excellence honor for undergraduate study (SP 2021).

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