I am a PhD student at Blender Lab at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), currently advised by Prof. Heng Ji. I obtained my Master’s from the Graduate School of AI at KAIST, under the supervision of Prof. Sung Ju Hwang. If you are interested in collaborating with me on research projects, please contact me! Here is my CV.

My research aims to build creative, reliable, and trustworthy multimodal AI that can understand, reason over, and act upon complex real-world information. My primary research interest includes:

• Creative and Adaptive Intelligence: Enabling foundation models to generate novel, useful, and context-aware solutions beyond memorized patterns (CreativityBench, MM-CreativityBench, SYNTHIA).
  
• Grounded Knowledge and Multimodal Reasoning: Developing models that integrate perception, external knowledge, memory, and feedback across diverse modalities and environments (MemGuard, NarrativeTrack) .
  
• Reliable and Trustworthy Decision-Making: Improving robustness, interpretability, uncertainty awareness, and consistency so AI systems can act dependably in the real world (MM-PoisonRAG, BEAT, FlowGuard).

🔥 News

	MemGuard: Preventing Memory Contamination in Long-Term Memory-Augmented Large Language Models [paper] [Project Page] Hyeonjeong Ha, Jeonghwan Kim, Cheng Qian, Jiayu Liu, William M. Campbell, Yue Wu, Yuji Zhang, Kathleen McKeown, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Heng Ji EMNLP 2026 (Findings)
	CreativityBench: Evaluating Creative Reasoning via Affordance-Based Tool Repurposing [paper] [Project Page] Cheng Qian*, Hyeonjeong Ha*, Jiayu Liu, Bingxiang He, Jeonghwan Kim, Jiateng Liu, Bingxuan Li, Aditi Tiwari, Dwip Dalal, Zhenhailong Wang, Xiusi Chen, Mahdi Namazifar, Yunzhu Li, Heng Ji (* equal contribution) COLM 2026
	NarrativeTrack: Evaluating Video Language Models Beyond the Frame [paper] [Apple Blog] Hyeonjeong Ha, Jinjin Ge, Bo Feng, Kaixin Ma, Gargi Chakraborty ECCV 2026 (Spotlight)
	Securing Multimodal AI through Internal Information Decomposition [paper] Jehyeok Yeon, Hyeonjeong Ha, Qiusi Zhan, Heng Ji ICML 2026 (Spotlight)
	MM-PoisonRAG: Disrupting Multimodal RAG with Local and Global Poisoning Attacks [paper] Hyeonjeong Ha*, Qiusi Zhan*, Jeonghwan Kim, Dimitrios Bralios, Saikrishna Sanniboina, Nanyun Peng, Kai-wei Chang, Heng Ji (* equal contribution) ACL 2026 Main ICLR 2026 Workshop on Principled Design for Trustworthy AI
	Visual Backdoor Attacks on MLLM Embodied Decision Making via Contrastive Trigger Learning [paper] [page] Qiusi Zhan*, Hyeonjeong Ha*, Rui Yang, Sirui Xu, Hanyang Chen, Liangyan Gui, Yu-Xiong Wang, Huan Zhang, Heng Ji, Daniel Kang (* equal contribution) ICLR 2026
	SYNTHIA: Novel Concept Design with Affordance Composition [paper] [page] Hyeonjeong Ha*, Xiaomeng Jin*, Jeonghwan Kim, Jiateng Liu, Zhenhailong Wang, Khanh Duy Nguyen, Ansel Blume, Nanyun Peng, Kai-Wei Chang, Heng Ji (* equal contribution) ACL 2025 (Main)

📖 Educations

• 2024.08 - Present, Ph.D in Computer Science, UIUC.
• 2022.02 - 2024.02, M.S. in Graduate School of AI, KAIST.
• 2017.02 - 2022.02, B.S. in Computer Science (major) and Bio & Brain Engineering (minor), KAIST.

💻 Work Experience

	Meta Research Scientist Intern @ Meta Reality Labs	Redmond, WA, USA May 2026 – Aug 2026
	Apple Machine Learning Research Intern	Seattle, WA, USA May 2025 – Aug 2025
	Samsung Research Machine Learning Engineer, Full-Time	Seoul, South Korea Feb 2024 – Jul 2024
	NAVER Software Developer Intern	Seongnam, South Korea Sep 2020 – Feb 2021
	KIXLAB Undergraduate Research Intern Advisor: Prof. Juho Kim	Daejeon, South Korea Jun 2020 – Aug 2020
	H2K Software Developer Intern	Daejeon, South Korea Jun 2019 – Dec 2019

👩‍💻 Academic Service

• Reviewer: ECCV (2026), CVPR (2026), ICLR (2026), ICML (2025, 2024, 2023), NeurIPS (2026, 2023)