Human-Centered Conversational AI

Takyoung Kim

김탁영 (金卓映)

Hello! I am a Ph.D. Candidate in Conversational AI Lab at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Computer Science, advised by Prof. Dilek Hakkani-Tür. I build conversational agents that communicate naturally, understand social nuances, and adapt to people.

Contact
Affiliation tk30 [at] illinois [dot] edu
Personal takyoung.ai [at] gmail [dot] com
Takyoung Kim

News

  • Our DuplexGen has been accepted to EMNLP 2026 → Selected as an oral presentation.

  • Check out our new preprint, DuplexGen! We explore how to simulate scenario-specific turn-taking behaviors in full-duplex communication.

  • Our work on Diagnostic Framework for Interactive Agents has been accepted to IEEE TASLP Journal.

  • Our work on Segment-based Topic Assignment has been accepted to Findings of ACL 2026.

  • I passed the qual exam titled “Seamless Spoken Interaction with AI Companions: Naturalness and Efficiency.” Now I’m officially a PhD candidate!

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Work
Experience

Meta Superintelligence Labs

May 2026 - Aug 2026

Research Scientist Intern, Voice Modeling Team
Mentors: Duc Le, Naoyuki Kanda, Abdelrahman Mohamed

Amazon Alexa AI

May 2025 - Aug 2025

Applied Scientist Intern, Conversational Assistant Modeling and Learning
Mentors: Jinseok Nam, Chandrayee Basu, Chengyuan Ma

LG AI Research

Apr 2023 - Mar 2024

Research Scientist Intern, Advanced Machine Learning Lab
Mentors: Kyungjae Lee, Moontae Lee

NAVER AI Lab

Jul 2022 - Jan 2023

Research Scientist Intern, Language Research Team
Mentor: Sungdong Kim

Education

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Aug 2024 - Present

Doctor of Philosophy, Computer Science

Korea University

Sep 2020 - Aug 2022

Master of Engineering, Industrial Management Engineering

Sungkyunkwan University

Mar 2013 - Aug 2020

Bachelor of Science in Engineering, Interdisciplinary Program of Convergent Software
Bachelor of Media & Communication

Publications

*, † = Equal Contribution

2026

MMJail: Compounded Multilingual and Multi-Turn Vulnerabilities in LLM Bias Resistance

Anisha Rao, Takyoung Kim, Dilek Hakkani-Tür

WOAH Workshop at EMNLP · 2026
TL;DR

Shows how multilingual prompts and multi-turn interactions can compound weaknesses in LLM safeguards against biased responses.

AURA: A Diagnostic Framework for Tracking User Satisfaction of Interactive Planning Agents

Takyoung Kim*, Janvijay Singh*, Shuhaib Mehri*, Emre Can Acikgoz, Sagnik Mukherjee, Nimet Beyza Bozdag, Sumuk Shashidhar, Gokhan Tur, Dilek Hakkani-Tür

IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing (Q1, Impact Factor: 5.1) · 2026
MTI-LLM Workshop at NeurIPS · 2025
TL;DR

Evaluates planning agents across intermediate behaviors as well as final outcomes to reveal what drives user satisfaction throughout an interaction.

2025

2024

2023

SQuARe: A Large-Scale Dataset of Sensitive Questions and Acceptable Responses Created Through Human-Machine Collaboration

Hwaran Lee*, Seokhee Hong*, Joonsuk Park, Takyoung Kim, Meeyoung Cha, Yejin Choi, Byoung Pil Kim, Gunhee Kim, Eun-Ju Lee, Yong Lim, Alice Oh, Sangchul Park, Jung-Woo Ha

ACL · 2023 Oral Presentation Best Paper Nomination
TL;DR

Provides a large Korean dataset of sensitive questions and acceptable responses to help language models discuss delicate topics more safely.

2022

Personal

I love sports! These days I am enjoying running 🏃‍♂️, bouldering 🧗‍♂️, and tennis 🎾.