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RIKEN Information R&D and Strategy Headquarters Knowledge Acquisition and Dialogue Research Team

Team Director: Koichiro Yoshino (Ph.D.)

Research Summary

Koichiro Yoshino (Ph.D.)

Communication through language is an essential tool for robots to cooperate with users in daily lives. This research team focuses on modeling intention estimation, thinking, and inference on verbal and non-verbal communications. We are working on the following topics:

  • 1.action management of dialogue robots
  • 2.spoken dialogue related technologies
  • 3.modeling thinking, inference, and topic selection of robots
  • 4.knowledge expressions grounded on robot behaviors and dialogue contents
  • 5.incorporating emotion and language information
  • 6.empathy, emotion, and trust in dialogue

Main Research Fields

  • Complex Systems

Related Research Fields

  • Engineering
  • Informatics
  • Interdisciplinary Science & Engineering
  • Mathematical & Physical Sciences
  • Human informatics – Intelligent informatics
  • Human informatics – Perceptual information processing
  • Human informatics – Intelligent robotics

Keywords

  • Spoken Language Processing (Recognition and Dialogue)
  • Natural Language Processing (Understanding, Generation)
  • Multimodal Information Processing
  • Intelligent Robot Dialogue
  • Machine Learning (Reinforcement Learning, Quantum Machine Learning)

Selected Publications

  • 1. Muhammad Yeza Baihaqi, Angel Fernando Garcia Contreras, Seiya Kawano, Koichiro Yoshino
    "LLM-Driven Approach for Motion Control in Human-Robot Dialogue for Elevating Engagement"
    In Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN), Eindhoven, Netherlands, August 2025.
  • 2. Shun Inadumi, Nobuhiro Ueda, Koichiro Yoshino
    "Disambiguating Reference in Visually Grounded Dialogues through Joint Modeling of Textual and Multimodal Semantic Structures"
    In Proceedings of The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), Vienna, Austria, July 2025.
  • 3. Canasai Kruengkrai, Koichiro Yoshino
    "Teaching Text Agents to Learn Sequential Decision Making from Failure"
    In Proceedings of The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), Vienna, Austria, July 2025.
  • 4. Takuma Miwa, Yusuke Oda, Seiya Kawano, Koichiro Yoshino
    "Efficient Channel Generation for QCNN based on Multi-Pauli Matrices"
    In Proceedings of International Conference on Quantum Communications, Networking, and Computing (QCNC), Nara, Japan, March 2025.
  • 5. Kai Yoshida, Masahiro Mizukami, Seiya Kawano, Canasai Kruenkrai, Hiroaki Sugiyama, Koichiro Yoshino
    "Training Dialogue Systems by AI Feedback for Improving Overall Dialogue Impression"
    In Proceedings of the 50th IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), Hyderabad, India, April 2025.
  • 6. Nobuhiro Ueda, Hideko Habe, Yoko Matsui, Akishige Yuguchi, Seiya Kawano, Yasutomo Kawanishi, Sadao Kurohashi, Koichiro Yoshino
    "J-CRe3: A Japanese Conversation Dataset for Real-world Reference Resolution"
    In Proceedings of The 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING), Torino, Italy, May 2024.
  • 7. Shang-Chi Tsai, Seiya Kawano, Angel Garcia Contreras, Koichiro Yoshino, Yun-Nung Chen
    "ASMR: Augmenting Life Scenario using Large Generative Models for Robotic Action Reflection"
    In Proceedings of International Workshop on Spoken Dialogue Systems Technology (IWSDS) 2024, Sapporo, Japan, March. 2024, Best Paper Award.
  • 8. Shohei Tanaka, Konosuke Yamasaki, Akishige Yuguchi, Seiya Kawano, Satoshi Nakamura, Koichiro Yoshino.
    "Do as I Demand, Not as I Say: A Dataset for Developing a Reflective Life Support Robot."
    IEEE Access, Vol. 12, pp.11774-11784, January 2024.
  • 9. Koichiro Yoshino, Yun-Nung Chen, Paul Crook, Satwik Kottur, Jinchao Li, Behnam Hedayatnia, Seungwhan Moon, Zhengcong Fei, Zekang Li, Jinchao Zhang, Yang Feng, Jie Zhou, Seokhwan Kim, Yang Liu, Di Jin, Alexandros Papangelis, Karthik Gopalakrishnan, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Babak Damavandi, Alborz Geramifard, Chiori Hori, Ankit Shah, Chen Zhang, Haizhou Li, João Sedoc, Luis F. D'Haro, Rafael Banchs and Alexander Rudnicky.
    "Overview of the Tenth Dialog System Technology Challenge: DSTC10"
    IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing (TASLP), Vol. 32, pp.765-768, July 2023
  • 10. Taiki Nakamura, Seiya Kawano, Akishige Yuguchi, Yasutomo Kawanishi and Koichiro Yoshino
    "Operative Action Captioning for Estimating System Actions"
    In Proceedings of 2023 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA2023), London, UK, May 2023.

Lab Members

Principal investigator

Koichiro Yoshino
Team Director

Core members

Canasai Kruengkrai
Research Scientist
Angel Fernando Garcia Contreras
Postdoctoral Researcher
Hideko Habe
Technical Staff I
Yoko Matsui
Technical Staff I
Shun Inazumi
Junior Research Associate
Kazuyo Onishi
Junior Research Associate
Hyuga Nakaguro
Junior Research Associate

Contact Information

3rd Floor, Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International
2-2-2 Hikaridai Seika-cho, Sorakugun, Kyoto
619-0288 Japan (Kansai Science City)
Email: koichiro.yoshino@riken.jp

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