About me
Hi! I’m a 2nd-year Master’s student in Electrical Engineering at the University of Southern California, working closely with Prof. Salman Avestimehr and Prof. Sai Praneeth Karimireddy. I also collaborate with Prof. Sunwoo Lee. Previously, I received my B.S. in Electronic Engineering from Sogang University, where I worked with Prof. Hongseok Kim.
I am applying for Fall 2026 Ph.D. programs, actively seeking opportunities!
My research focuses on building trustworthy LLMs. I mainly work on uncertainty quantification in LLMs for reliable decision-making. Moving forward, I aim to extend my research in reasoning and interpretability, to better understand the internal mechanisms of large models and leverage these insights to enhance their reliability and safety. I am also interested in advancing these directions toward multi-modal and multi-agent systems, with the long-term goal of developing trustworthy agents that can operate safely and transparently in the real world. Besides, I have research experience in federated learning and parameter-efficient fine-tuning.
You can find my specific research interest in the Research section.
📰 News
- Oct 15, 2025 - Our survey paper Uncertainty Quantification for Hallucination Detection in Large Language Models: Foundations, Methodology, and Future Directions is released!
- Sep 18, 2025 - Our paper Layer-wise Update Aggregation with Recycling for Communication-Efficient Federated Learning got accepted to NeurIPS 2025! 🎉
- Sep 10, 2025 – Our TruthTorchLM paper got accepted to EMNLP 2025 System Demonstrations! 🎉
- Jul 30, 2025 - I presented our paper, “Reconsidering LLM Uncertainty Estimation Methods in the Wild” at ACL 2025!
- May 16, 2025 – Our paper “Reconsidering LLM Uncertainty Estimation Methods in the Wild” was accepted to ACL 2025! 🎉
- May 05, 2025 – I attended the ATHENA AI Summit 2025 — “Big AI for Small Devices” — at Duke University. It was a great opportunity to connect with distinguished faculty members and leading researchers in the field!
- May 02, 2025 – Our open-source library for assessing LLM truthfulness, TruthTorchLM, officially released!
- May 02, 2025 – I attended the USC-Amazon Center Annual Symposium at USC. It was inspiring to explore recent advances in AI agents, reasoning, and trustworthy machine learning.
- Aug 26, 2024 – I started my M.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering at USC. Excited for the journey ahead!
- May 22, 2024 - I gave a talk about Federated Learning using TCP socket communication at Sogang University.
- Feb 20, 2024 – I graduated from Sogang University with a B.S. in Electronic Engineering!
🎓 Education
University of Southern California (USC), Los Angeles, USA
M.S. in Electrical Engineering
Aug. 2024 – May. 2026 (Expected)
GPA: 4.00 / 4.00 – MS Honors Fellow
Sogang University, Seoul, Republic of Korea
B.S. in Electronic Engineering, Micro-degree in Artificial Intelligence
Mar. 2018 – Feb. 2024
GPA: 3.91 / 4.3 – Magna Cum Laude
📬 Contact
Feel free to contact me at kangsung@usc.edu or connect via LinkedIn