About

Hello! I am a first year master's student in CS at Brown University , working with Prof. Randall Balestriero and Prof. David Klindt. Prior to joining Brown, I worked as an AI researcher at Boeing. Even before that, I completed my B.S. at Yonsei University. I am grateful to have my studies funded through the Fulbright Program scholarship. I am broadly interested in building machines with more human-like visual perception and visual reasoning.

Current role

M.S. student at Brown

Research focus

Structured Representation Learning, World Model

Recognition

Stanford CS25 Guest Lecturer

Opportunities

Ph.D. positions starting in Fall 2027

CV Google Scholar heejeong_nam at brown dot edu

News

Jun. 2026 3 papers accepted: one in ICML, one in ICML workshop, and one in UAI!
May. 2026 I will spend summer at CSHL for NeuroAI research internship.
Apr. 2026 I will give a lightning talk at NYC Computer Vision Day 2026!
Apr. 2026 I will visit Stanford for CS25 guest lecture (Apr 8-10)
Mar. 2026 I gave an invited talk at POSTECH (Zoom Webinar). Slide available here.
Feb. 2026 Causal-JEPA is released! Check out the tweet for a quick summary!
Feb. 2026 I will attend World Modeling Workshop 2026 in Montreal, Canada!
Sep. 2025 Check out Boeing Magazine’s latest issue featuring our project HERE!
Sep. 2025 I start my M.S. in Computer Science at Brown University .
May. 2025 I am honored to be selected as a Logo graduate student.
Mar. 2025 Our multimodal reasoning benchmark VAGUE 2.0 (ICCV 2025) is released!
Oct. 2024 1 paper is accepted at AdvML-Frontiers @ NeurIPS 2024
Jun. 2024 I started research collaboration @ Causality Lab (SNU).
Jan. 2024 I joined Logo as an AI Researcher.
Dec. 2023 1 paper is accepted at ICASSP 2024
Oct. 2023 1 paper is accepted at CRL @ NeurIPS 2023
Oct. 2023 Selected as a NeurIPS 2023 Volunteer.
Sep. 2023 I started Industry-Academic Cooperation @ LinqAlpha.
Sep. 2023 1 paper is accepted in 4th Korea Artificial Intelligence Conference.
Oct. 2022 I starteed my internship at AITRICS (~Feb '23).
Jun. 2022 I starteed my internship at VRL @ UCSB. (~Sep '22)

Selected Publications


Full list available here

ICML 2026
Causal-JEPA: Learning World Models through Object-Level Latent Interventions
Heejeong Nam, Quentin Le Lidec*, Lucas Maes*, Yann LeCun, Randall Balestriero
ICML 2026
UAI 2026
Towards Causal Representation Learning with Observable Sources as Auxiliaries
Kwonho Kim, Heejeong Nam, Inwoo Hwang, Sanghack Lee
UAI 2026
ICCV 2025
VAGUE: Visual Contexts Clarify Ambiguous Expressions
Heejeong Nam*, Jinwoo Ahn*, Keummin Ka, Jiwan Chung, Youngjae Yu
International Conference on Computer Vision, 2025
NeurIPS CRL 2023
SCADI: Self-supervised Causal Disentanglement in Latent Variable Models
Heejeong Nam
NeurIPS 2023 Workshop on Causal Representation Learning

Talks

Media

Miscellaneous

I love (almost all) outdoor activities. I love going gym, figure skating, snow boarding, and running. However, I am very bad at cooking so don't ask me for home-cooked Korean food 😛. I am caffeine addicted, so I am always down for a coffee chat.