Hikaru Asano | The University of Tokyo

About Me

I am a 3rd-year PhD student at University of Tokyo.

Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning: Cooperation in Decentralized Manner
Computational Social Science: Application of ML for Social Science
LLM for Behavior Understanding: Replication of Human Behavior and Utilizing Common Sense Reasoning

[Mar. 2026] Received Young Researcher Award (21/517 top 4%) at NLP 2026.
[Mar. 2026] Our paper on Masked Diffusion Language Models has been selected for oral presentation at NLP 2026 (32 out of 799 submissions).
[Feb. 2026] Release new preprint on Masked Diffusion Language Models.
[Sep. 2025] Our paper on LLM’s self-reflection has been accepted to NeurIPS 2025.

D.Sc in Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, The University of Tokyo (2024.4-present)
M.S in Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Information Studies, The University of Tokyo (2022.4-2024.3)
B.E in Systems Innovation, Faculty of Engineering, The University of Tokyo (2019.4-2022.3)

Sakana AI, Research Intern (2026.4-present)
OMRON SINIC X Corporation, Research Intern (2025.12-2026.3)
CyberAgent AI Lab, Part-time Researcher (2023.10-2025.10)
OMRON SINIC X Corporation, Research Intern (2022.3-2023.8)
OMRON SINIC X Corporation, Research Intern (2020.8-2020.9)

Hikaru Asano, Tadashi Kozuno, Yukino Baba, “Self Iterative Label Refinement via Robust Unlabeled Learning”, The Thirty-Ninth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2025, poster, acceptance rate 24.5%
arXiv Code
Hikaru Asano, Hiroki Ouchi, Taiki Sekii, Ryo Yonetani, “Text2Traj2Text: Learning-by-Synthesis Framework for Contextual Captioning of Human Movement Trajectories”, International Natural Language Generation Conference (INLG), 2024, long paper
arXiv Code
Eiko Matsuda, Hikaru Asano, Tomoyuki Yuzawa, Osamu Sakura, “Quantitative and Qualitative Analyses on Child's Animate Tendency”, Cognitive feelings: Towards multi-disciplinary approaches for realizing artificial systems with cognitive capacities (ALIFE 2023 workshop), 2023
Hikaru Asano, Osamu Sakura, “Rashomon Bound Regression: a Reproducible and Explorable Method for Regression-Based Analysis”, International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2), 2023, poster
Hikaru Asano, Ryo Yonetani, Mai Nishimura, Tadashi Kozuno, “Counterfactual Fairness Filter for Fair-Delay Multi-Robot Navigation”, International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS), 2023, oral, acceptance rate 23.3%
arXiv Code

Hikaru Asano, Tadashi Kozuno, Kuniaki Saito, Yukino Baba, “Where-to-Unmask: Ground-Truth-Guided Unmasking Order Learning for Masked Diffusion Language Models”, arXiv preprint, 2026
arXiv
Hikaru Asano, Hiroki Ouchi, Akira Kasuga, Ryo Yonetani, “MobQA: A Benchmark Dataset for Semantic Understanding of Human Mobility Data through Question Answering”, arXiv preprint, 2025
arXiv Code
Hikaru Asano, “Sequential Bayesian experimental designs via reinforcement learning”, arXiv preprint, 2022
arXiv

Research RA in Value Exchange Engineering by RIISE@UTokyo, 2,000,000 yen, 2023-2024.
The foundation Matsuo Scholarship Society, Scholarship and commuting expenses grant, free accommodation in student dormitories, provision of meals (free), health insurance expenses grant, total amount granted: approximately 5,000,000 yen, 2019-2023.

Young Researcher Award (21/517), The 32nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Natural Language Processing@Japan, 2026.
Hatakeyama Prize, Tomakomai National Institute of Technology, 2019.