Kyung Min (Brian) Ko

kkm97183 [at] uw [dot] edu

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MS @ University of Washington
kkm97183 [at] uw [dot] edu

Research Interests: LLM, Reinforcemennt Learning, Agent

Welcome! I’m an M.S. student at the University of Washington working on large language models and reinforcement learning. I previously graduated from Purdue University with distinction. I am fortunated to have collaborated with Prof. Huan Zhang (UIUC) on the intersection of LLMs and RL, and with Prof. David I. Inouye (Purdue) on statistical machine learning.

I was grateful to be selected for NSF-funded summer research program twice, advised by Prof. Siva Theja Maguluri (Georgia Tech) and Prof. Lin Tan (Purdue).

I’m open to collaboration—please email me if you’d like to discuss ideas.

My research interests span across agentic ai, large language models (LLMs) and reinforcement learning.

news

Sep 23, 2025 I started my M.S at University of Washington
Dec 20, 2024 I joined Huan Zhang’s research lab at UIUC
May 23, 2024 I graduated Purdue University with distinction in ECE!
Mar 15, 2024 I am starting my research assistant position at Prof. David I. Inouye’s lab focusing on Truthyworthy ML!
May 28, 2023 Accepted to Purdue NSF-SURF program!

selected publications

  1. Under review at AISTATS26
    A Unified Framework for Comparing Distribution Matching Methods Across Trustworthy Machine Learning Tasks
    Brian Ko, Ziyu Gong, Jim Lim, and David Inouye
    2025
  2. Under review at ICLR26
    On The Fragility of Benchmark Contamination Detection in Reasoning Models
    2025
  3. IEEE RO-MAN Oral
    Backward Curriculum Reinforcement Learning
    Brian Ko
    In 2023 32nd IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN), 2023
  4. Pre-Print
    V-advCSE: Virtual Adversarial Contrastive Learning for Sentence Embeddings
    Brian Ko
    2023
  5. Pre-Print
    Unmasking the Author: Exploiting Code Language Models and Contrastive Learning in Binary Code Authorship Attribution
    Kyung Min Ko, Nan Jiang, and Lin Tan
    2023