Woojin Lee

About

I am an AI Researcher at the Language Intelligence Lab, ETRI. I earned my M.S. in Artificial Intelligence from Konkuk University under Prof. Harksoo Kim, following a B.E. in Civil and Environmental Engineering at the same university.

My research investigates when and why LLMs make decisions that lead to reliable and useful outcomes. I study how internal representations, reasoning processes, and contextual factors such as emotion and culture shape those decisions, and develop methods to improve them through execution, external feedback, and verification. I am particularly interested in building verifiable LLM agents for code and science that reason, act, and verify their decisions against external evidence.

Education

• M.S. in Artificial Intelligence — Konkuk University, Mar. 2023 - Aug. 2025
  Advisor: Prof. Harksoo Kim (NLP Lab)
• B.E. in Civil & Environmental Engineering — Konkuk University, Mar. 2017 - Feb. 2023
  Smartcity & Software Convergence Track

Publications

1. SolidCoder: Bridging the Mental-Reality Gap in LLM Code Generation through Concrete Execution
   

   Woojin Lee, Jin-Xia Huang

   
   ACL 2026 (Findings)
2. Idea Generation in AI for Science: A Survey from Hypothesis Generation to Closed-Loop Discovery
   

   Jin-Xia Huang*, Woojin Lee*, Yoonkyu Woo

   
   InUS Transactions, Jun. 2026
3. Multilingual, Not Multicultural: Uncovering the Cultural Empathy Gap in LLMs through a Comparative Empathetic Dialogue Benchmark
   

   Woojin Lee*, Yujin Sim*, Hongjin Kim, Harksoo Kim

   
   IJCNLP-AACL 2025 (Main)
4. Do Large Language Models Have "Emotion Neurons"? Investigating the Existence and Role
   

   Jaewook Lee*, Woojin Lee*, Oh-wook Kwon, Harksoo Kim

   
   ACL 2025 (Findings)
5. LOGIC: LLM-originated guidance for internal cognitive improvement of small language models in stance detection
   

   Woojin Lee*, Jaewook Lee*, Harksoo Kim

   
   PeerJ Computer Science, Dec. 2024
6. Analyzing Key Factors Influencing Emotion Prediction Performance of VLLMs in Conversational Contexts
   

   Jaewook Lee*, Yeajin Jang*, Hongjin Kim, Woojin Lee, Harksoo Kim

   
   EMNLP 2024 (Main)
7. Persona-Identified Chatbot through Small-Scale Modeling and Data Transformation
   

   Bitna Keum, Juoh Sun, Woojin Lee, Seongheum Park, Harksoo Kim

   
   Electronics, Apr. 2024

* Equal contribution

Experience

• Researcher — Language Intelligence Lab, ETRI, Sep. 2025 - Present
  Full-time contract, post-M.S.
• Researcher — Language Intelligence Lab, ETRI, Jun. 2025 - Aug. 2025
  Part-time contract, during M.S.

Open Source

• Contributor — Gajae-Code, Jul. 2026 - Present
  A coding-agent harness that plans, builds, and verifies software

Invited Talks

• AI-Native Research with Harness Engineering Jul. 2026
  Korea Basic Science Institute (KBSI) · Invited seminar for researchers
• AI in Flux: The Changing Landscape of Research, Development, and Careers Jun. 2026
  Korea Computer Congress (KCC 2026) · Special-session talk
• The Era of AI-Native Research Jun. 2026
  Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) · Internal seminar for researchers
• Harness Engineering for Researchers Jun. 2026
  AI Friends · Paid lecture (online / offline)
• AI-Native Research with Claude May 2026
  Daejeon | Claude Meetup for Everyone · Community meetup

Academic Services

• Reviewer
  NeurIPS 2026

Honors & Awards

• KU Nationwide Startup Idea Competition
  Excellence Award, Nov. 2022
• KISTI Research Data-AI Analysis & Utilization Competition
  Excellence Award, Dec. 2021

Leadership Experience

• Sergeant — Republic of Korea Army, Feb. 2018 - Oct. 2019
  Mandatory military service