Yewon Kim

Hi! My name is Yewon. I am a second-year Ph.D. student in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University, advised by Chris Donahue. I study how AI can expand the ways people create and interact with music while keeping human creativity at the center. I am particularly interested in two directions: (i) building interactive systems that support iterative human-AI co-creation, and (ii) exploring new forms of musical experience made possible by AI, such as interactive AI music. I have published papers in top-tier venues in HCI (CHI, DIS) and AI (NeurIPS), with a Best Paper award at CHI.

Previously, I was a research scientist intern at Adobe Research. I received my M.S. in Electrical Engineering from KAIST, where I was co-advised by Sung-Ju Lee and Mina Lee.

Beyond research, I spend my time playing and experimenting with music, drawing, and occasionally writing. You can find some of my work on my blog and Youtube channel.

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News


Nov. 2026	📚 Co-presented the LLMs × Music tutorial at ISMIR 2026
Jul. 2026	🩵 New preprint on music decompilation!
May 2026	👩🏻‍💻 Research Scientist Intern at Adobe (Seattle, WA)
Apr. 2026	✈️ Attending CHI 2026 @ Barcelona, Spain
Jan. 2026	🌷 Paper accepted at CHI 2026
Aug. 2025	💖 Started my Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon University
Jul. 2025	✈️ Attending DIS 2025 @ Funchal, Madeira
May 2025	🌷 Paper accepted at DIS 2025
Apr. 2025	🏆 Amuse won the Best Paper Award (top 1%) at CHI 2025!
Apr. 2025	✈️ Attending CHI 2025 @ Yokohama, Japan
Jan. 2025	🌷 Paper accepted at CHI 2025
Apr. 2024	👩🏻‍💻 Visiting research at CMU @ Pittsburgh, PA (Apr - Sep)
Jan. 2024	🌷 Paper accepted at CHI 2024
Oct. 2023	✈️ UbiComp/ISWC 2023 @ Cancun, Mexico (Oct 8 - 12)
Sep. 2023	🌷 Paper accepted at NeurIPS 2023
Apr. 2023	🌷 Paper accepted at IMWUT (UbiComp) 2023
Apr. 2023	✈️ CHI 2023 @ Hamburg, Germany (Apr 22 - 29)
Mar. 2023	🌷 Paper accepted at CHI Workshop 2023
Feb. 2023	🌷 Paper accepted at CHI LBW 2023
Nov. 2022	✈️ NeurIPS 2022 @ New Orleans, LA (Nov 28 - Dec 3)
Sep. 2022	🌷 Paper accepted at NeurIPS 2022
Jul. 2022	🏆 Won the Students with Outstanding Questions Award of KAIST
Feb. 2022	🍀 Joined Networking & Mobile Systems Lab as a Master's Student
Feb. 2022	🎓 Graduated from KAIST with honors

Research

Selected All

Decomposer: Learning to Decompile Symbolic Music to Programs
Yewon Kim, Apurva Gandhi, David Chung, Graham Neubig, Chris Donahue
Preprint
Paper Website Demo Code

A Design Space for Live Music Agents
Yewon Kim, Stephen Brade, Alexander Wang, David Zhou, Haven Kim, Bill Wang, Sung-Ju Lee, Hugo F Flores Garcia, Cheng-Zhi Anna Huang, Chris Donahue
CHI 2026
Paper Website

Amuse: Human-AI Collaborative Songwriting with Multimodal Inspirations
Yewon Kim, Sung-Ju Lee, Chris Donahue
CHI 2025
Best Paper Award (Top 1%)
Paper Website Code Video

Design Opportunities for Explainable AI Paraphrasing Tools: A User Study with Non-native English Speakers
Yewon Kim, Thanh-Long V. Le, Donghwi Kim, Mina Lee^†, Sung-Ju Lee^†
^†Equal senior role
DIS 2025
Paper

Hookpad Aria: A Copilot for Songwriters
Chris Dohanue, Shih-Lun Wu, Yewon Kim, Dave Carlton, Ryan Miyakawa, John Thickstun
ISMIR Late Breaking Demos 2024
Paper Poster Talk

A Design Space for Intelligent and Interactive Writing Assistants
Mina Lee, Katy Ilonka Gero, John Joon Young Chung et al. (30+ authors)
§4.2 User: Katy Ilonka Gero, Yewon Kim, Senjuti Dutta, Lila Shroff, Disha Shrivastava, John Joon Young Chung, Eugenia Ha Rim Rho
CHI 2024
Paper Website

Towards Explainable AI Writing Assistants for Non-native English Speakers
Yewon Kim, Mina Lee, Donghwi Kim, Sung-Ju Lee
CHI 2023 Workshop on Intelligent and Interactive Writing Assistants
Paper Website

Tailoring Interactions: Exploring the Opportune Moment for Remote Computer-mediated Interactions with Home-alone Dogs
Yewon Kim, Taesik Gong, and Sung-Ju Lee
CHI Extended Abstracts 2023
Paper Website Poster Talk

SoTTA: Robust Test-Time Adaptation on Noisy Data Streams
Taesik Gong*, Yewon Kim*, Taeckyung Lee*, Sorn Chottananurak, Sung-Ju Lee
^*Equal contribution
NeurIPS 2023
Paper Website Code

DAPPER: Label-Free Performance Estimation after Personalization for Heterogeneous Mobile Sensing
Taesik Gong, Yewon Kim, Adiba Orzikulova, Yunxin Liu, Sung Ju Hwang, Jinwoo Shin, Sung-Ju Lee
IMWUT (UbiComp) 2023
Paper Website

NOTE: Robust Continual Test-time Adaptation Against Temporal Correlation
Taesik Gong, Jongheon Jeong, Taewon Kim, Yewon Kim, Jinwoo Shin, Sung-Ju Lee
NeurIPS 2022
Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship Finalist
Paper Website Code Poster Talk

Honors

Best Paper Award (top 1%), ACM CHI 2025
Paper Title: "Amuse: Human-AI Collaborative Songwriting with Multimodal Inspirations"

Special Recognition for Outstanding Reviews
CHI 2024, UIST 2025, CHI 2026

NMSL Labmate of the Year
I was awarded the Labmate of the Year (2022) by our lab members for demonstrating exceptional qualities in teamwork, leadership, and dedication to our lab's success! Comments can be found here :)

Graduate of the Year Award (KAIST Alumni Association Chairperson's Prize)
Honor for top 5 (0.7%) out of 695 students, who demonstrated outstanding performances in various activities as well as in grades. Awarded at the commencement ceremony. KAIST, Feb. 2022

Engineering Innovator Award
In recognition of the outstanding engineering accomplishments. KAIST College of Engineering, Sep. 2021

Grand Prix Prize in Undergraduate Research Participation Program
DAPPER: Training-Free Domain Adaptation Performance Estimation in Mobile Sensing. KAIST, Aug. 2021

National Science and Engineering Undergraduate Scholarship
Merit-based scholarship awarded by Korea Student Aid Foundation. Fall 2020

Department Honors Scholarship
Awarded to top 3 (0.4%) out of 800+ students in School of Electrical Engineering. Salutatorian. KAIST, Spring 2020

Dean's List
Awarded to top 3% among 2,900+ students in College of Engineering. KAIST, Spring 2020

Leadership Mileage Certificate
Honor for top 3% among 3,600+ students with top achievements in leadership activities including volunteering and campus activities. KAIST, 2020