[Abstract]

Conversational agents play a crucial role in enabling natural and effective interactions between humans and machines, serving as a core component in a wide range of applications—from virtual assistants to open-domain dialogue systems that aim to emulate human-like conversational abilities. In this seminar, I will present the evolution of conversational models across multiple dimensions, highlighting advancements ranging from dialogue continuity across sessions to the integration of multimodal inputs into conversational systems. The talk will include an overview of the methods and technologies that support more dynamic and context-aware interactions, as well as promising directions for future research aimed at achieving more realistic human–machine communication. 

[Biography]

Hyounghun Kim is an assistant professor in the Graduate School of Artificial Intelligence and the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at POSTECH. He earned his Ph.D. from the Department of Computer Science at UNC-Chapel Hill, advised by Prof. Mohit Bansal. His research spans natural language processing and multimodal learning with focus on large language models, conversational agents, commonsense reasoning, image/video QA, as well as embodied AI. He has served as a senior action editor, action editor/area chair, and reviewer for ACL Rolling Review and AI top conferences. His professional experience includes internships at Adobe Research and Amazon Alexa AI, and a position as a software engineer at Samsung Electronics.