Youngwoo Yoon
Principal Researcher, ETRI
Email: youngwoo (at) etri.re.kr
Youngwoo
About
Youngwoo Yoon is a Principal Researcher in the Social Robotics Research Lab at ETRI (Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute), South Korea, and an Assistant Professor at UST (University of Science and Technology). His work bridges HCI, robotics, and machine learning. He's especially interested in developing autonomous social agents.
Selected Research
(See full list in Google Scholor; ✱ indicates equal contribution)
Learning Dexterous Bimanual Catch Skills through Adversarial-Cooperative Heterogeneous-Agent Reinforcement Learning
Taewoo Kim, Youngwoo Yoon, Jaehong Kim
ICRA 2025 / Paper / Code
A Spatio-Temporal Representation Learning as an Alternative to Traditional Glosses in Sign Language Translation and Production
Eui Jun Hwang, Sukmin Cho, Huije Lee, Youngwoo Yoon, Jong C Park
WACV 2025 / Paper
Evaluating Human-Care Robot Services for the Elderly: An Experimental Study
Miyoung Cho✱, Dohyung Kim✱, Minsu Jang✱, Jaeyeon Lee✱, Jaehong Kim✱, Woo-han Yun, Youngwoo Yoon, Jinhyeok Jang, Chankyu Park, Woo-Ri Ko, Jaeyoon Jang, Ho-Sub Yoon, Daeha Lee, Choulsoo Jang
IJSR (2024) / Paper
Evaluating gesture-generation in a large-scale open challenge: The GENEA Challenge 2022
Taras Kucherenko✱, Pieter Wolfert✱, Youngwoo Yoon✱, Carla Viegas, Teodor Nikolov, Mihail Tsakov, Gustav Eje Henter
ACM ToG (2024) / Paper / Project page
LoTa-Bench: Benchmarking Language-oriented Task Planners for Embodied Agents
Jae-Woo Choi✱, Youngwoo Yoon✱, Hyobin Ong, Jaehong Kim, Minsu Jang
ICLR 2024 / Paper / Code
Objective Evaluation Metric for Motion Generative Models: Validating Fréchet Motion Distance on Foot Skating and Over-smoothing Artifacts
Antoine Maiorca, Hugo Bohy, Youngwoo Yoon, Thierry Dutoit
MIG 2023 / Paper
The GENEA Challenge 2023: A large-scale evaluation of gesture generation models in monadic and dyadic settings
Taras Kucherenko✱, Rajmund Nagy✱, Youngwoo Yoon✱, Jieyeon Woo, Teodor Nikolov, Mihail Tsakov, Gustav Eje Henter
ICMI 2023 / Paper / Project page
Co-Speech Gesture Synthesis using Discrete Gesture Token Learning
Shuhong Lu, Youngwoo Yoon, Andrew Feng
IROS 2023 / Paper
Learning to Boost Training by Periodic Nowcasting Near Future Weights
Jinhyeok Jang, Woo-han Yun, Won Hwa Kim, Youngwoo Yoon, Jaehong Kim, Jaeyeon Lee, ByungOk Han
ICML 2023 / Paper / Code
A Tool for Extracting 3D Avatar-Ready Gesture Animations from Monocular Videos
Andrew Feng, Samuel Shin, Youngwoo Yoon
MIG 2022 / Paper / Project page
SGToolkit: An Interactive Gesture Authoring Toolkit for Embodied Conversational Agents
Youngwoo Yoon✱, Keunwoo Park✱, Minsu Jang, Jaehong Kim, Geehyuk Lee
UIST 2021 / Paper (ACM DL) / Paper (arXiv) / Code
A Large, Crowdsourced Evaluation of Gesture Generation Systems on Common Data: The GENEA Challenge 2020
Taras Kucherenko✱, Patrik Jonell✱, Youngwoo Yoon✱, Pieter Wolfert, Gustav Eje Henter
IUI 2021 / Paper / Project page
Speech Gesture Generation from the Trimodal Context of Text, Audio, Speaker Identity
Youngwoo Yoon, Bok Cha, Joo-Haeng Lee, Minsu Jang, Jaeyeon Lee, Jaehong Kim, Geehyuk Lee
ACM ToG (SIGGRAPH Asia 2020) / Paper (arXiv) / Paper (ACM DL) / Video / Code
DeepFisheye: Near-Surface Multi-Finger Tracking Technology Using Fisheye Camera
Keunwoo Park, Sunbum Kim, Youngwoo Yoon, Tae-Kyun Kim, Geehyuk Lee
UIST 2020 / Paper (PDF) / Paper (ACM DL) / Project page
Robots Learn Social Skills: End-to-End Learning of Co-Speech Gesture Generation for Humanoid Robots
Youngwoo Yoon, Woo-Ri Ko, Minsu Jang, Jaeyeon Lee, Jaehong Kim, Geehyuk Lee
ICRA 2019 / Paper (arXiv) / Paper (IEEE) / Video / Data and Code
Education
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)
Ph.D. in Computer Science (Advisor: Geehyuk Lee)
2017 - 2022
M.S. in Computer Science (Advisor: Geehyuk Lee)
2008 - 2006
B.S. in Computer Science
2003 - 2006
Daejeon, Republic of Korea
Experience
Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI)
Principal Researcher
2022 - Present
Senior Researcher
2014 - 2022
Researcher
2008 - 2014
Daejeon, Republic of Korea
Awards
Minister’s Commendation Award from Korea Ministry of Science and ICT
2024
Best Paper Award at CICS'24
2024
Research Paper Award from ETRI
2023
Outstanding Ph.D. Thesis Award from KAIST School of Computing
2022
Distinguished Graduate Award from ICU
2008
Science and Engineering Research Scholarships
2006-2007
ACM/International Collegiate Programming Contest Asia Regional - Seoul, 6th Place
2005
Korean Presidential Science Scholarships
2003-2006
Minister’s Award (i-clean public contest) from Korea Ministry of ICT
2002
Academic Activities
GENEA Workshop/Challenge series at MM 2025, ICMI 2024, ICMI 2023, ICMI 2022, ICMI 2021, IVA 2020
Expressive Encounters Workshop at ECCV 2024
Associate Editor of RO-MAN 2024
Reviewer for RA-L, IJSR, ICRA, IROS, SIGGRAPH/SIGGRAPH Asia, HRI, RO-MAN, TVCG, etc.
Supervising
Sungyoon Lim (Ph.D/MS course, 2024.08-)
Seyong Kang (MS course, 2024.08-, affiliated with AWS Korea)
Jeewon Cha (MS course, 2025.03-)