Taehyeon Kim
2026
Efficiently Learning To Reason or Not to Reason: Root-token Policy Optimization for Adaptive Thinking
Taehyeon Kim | Hyunsoo Lee | Youngsoo Jang | Moontae Lee
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Taehyeon Kim | Hyunsoo Lee | Youngsoo Jang | Moontae Lee
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Large reasoning models (LRMs) achieve strong performance by externalizing explicit reasoning traces before producing the answer, yet suffer from overthinking challenge that allocates uniformly heavy computation to queries of varying difficulty. While proprietary models mitigate this via opaque routing, open-source LRMs still lack an efficient mechanism to internalize adaptive reasoning due to both expensive training cost and limited disclosure of training recipes. In response, we introduce RPO (Root-token Policy Optimization), a framework that enables LRMs to self-determine when to reason by training only the initial root token (e.g., whether to invoke the think tag) via group relative reward and group-wise advantages. By focusing on this pivotal branching point, RPO drastically reduces training overhead and VRAM usage. Across multiple model families and scales, RPO learns difficulty-aware adaptive thinking at just 2% of the training compute of prior adaptive-reasoning methods.
MERIT Feedback Elicits Better Bargaining in LLM Negotiators
Jihwan Oh | Murad Aghazada | Yooju Shin | Se-Young Yun | Taehyeon Kim
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Jihwan Oh | Murad Aghazada | Yooju Shin | Se-Young Yun | Taehyeon Kim
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Bargaining is often regarded as a logical arena rather than an art or a matter of intuition, yet Large Language Models (LLMs) still struggle to navigate it due to limited strategic depth and difficulty adapting to complex human factors. Current benchmarks rarely capture this limitation. To bridge this gap, we present a utility feedback centric framework. Our contributions are: (i) AgoraBench, a new benchmark spanning nine challenging settings (e.g., deception, monopoly) that supports diverse strategy modeling; (ii) human-aligned, economically grounded metrics derived from utility theory. This is operationalized via agent utility, negotiation power, and acquisition ratio that implicitly measure how well the negotiation aligns with human preference and (iii) a human preference grounded dataset with learning pipeline that strengthens LLMs’ bargaining ability through both prompting and finetuning. Empirical results indicate that baseline LLM strategies often diverge from human preferences, while our mechanism substantially improves negotiation performance, yielding deeper strategic behavior and stronger opponent awareness.
2025
C2: Scalable Auto-Feedback for LLM-based Chart Generation
Woosung Koh | Janghan Yoon | MinHyung Lee | Youngjin Song | Jaegwan Cho | Jaehyun Kang | Taehyeon Kim | Se-Young Yun | Youngjae Yu | Bongshin Lee
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Woosung Koh | Janghan Yoon | MinHyung Lee | Youngjin Song | Jaegwan Cho | Jaehyun Kang | Taehyeon Kim | Se-Young Yun | Youngjae Yu | Bongshin Lee
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)
2024
Towards Fast Multilingual LLM Inference: Speculative Decoding and Specialized Drafters
Euiin Yi | Taehyeon Kim | Hongseok Jeung | Du-Seong Chang | Se-Young Yun
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Euiin Yi | Taehyeon Kim | Hongseok Jeung | Du-Seong Chang | Se-Young Yun
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing and broadened their applicability across diverse commercial applications. However, the deployment of these models is constrained by high inference time in multilingual settings. To mitigate this challenge, this paper explores a training recipe of an assistant model in speculative decoding, which are leveraged to draft and-then its future tokens are verified by the target LLM. We show that language-specific draft models, optimized through a targeted pretrain-and-finetune strategy, substantially brings a speedup of inference time compared to the previous methods. We validate these models across various languages in inference time, out-of-domain speedup, and GPT-4o evaluation.