Issa Sugiura
I am a first year PhD student at Institute of Science Tokyo, majoring in Computer Science.
I like to learn by building things.
Research
My research focuses on building the resources that drive progress in AI, and on using them to develop and evaluate models:
- constructing large-scale training datasets and reliable benchmarks (e.g., WAON, Jagle, JAMMEval, HakushoBench)
- developing vision-language models with these resources (e.g., LLM-jp-4-VL 9B)
- benchmarking LLM agents on economically valuable, long-horizon tasks (e.g., CoffeeBench, EDINET-Bench)
Education
- Apr 2026 – present
Doctoral Program (Expected)
Institute of Science Tokyo, Japan
Course of Artificial Intelligence, Department of Computer Science, School of Computing
- Apr 2024 – Mar 2026
Master's Degree
Kyoto University, Japan
Course of Communications and Computer Engineering, Graduate School of Informatics
- Apr 2020 – Mar 2024
Bachelor's Degree
Osaka University, Japan · GPA 3.57/4.00
Software Science Course, Department of Information and Computer Sciences, School of Engineering Science
Experience
- Apr 2026 – present
Research Assistant · Institute of Science Tokyo, Japan
Research on VLMs.
- Dec 2024 – present
Student Intern · Sakana AI, Japan
Building benchmarks with domain experts to evaluate LLM agents on economically valuable, long-horizon tasks, including financial analysis (EDINET-Bench, ICLR 2026) and multi-agent economies (CoffeeBench, NeurIPS 2026).
- Feb 2024 – present
Research Assistant · National Institute of Informatics, Japan
Developing Japanese vision-language models across the full pipeline: large-scale dataset construction (WAON, Jagle), evaluation benchmark design (JAMMEval, HakushoBench), and model training (LLM-jp-4-VL).
Publications
Peer-reviewed
- 1
- 2
Harbor Adapters and Harbor-Index: Infrastructure and a Curated Meta-Dataset for Large-Scale Agentic Evaluation
Lin Shi, et al. (incl. Issa Sugiura; 126 authors)
NeurIPS 2026 Evaluations and Datasets Track, Dec 2026
- 3
- 4
WAON: A Large-Scale Japanese Image-Text Dataset for Cultural Adaptation in Contrastive Vision-Language Models
Issa Sugiura, Shuhei Kurita, Yusuke Oda, Daisuke Kawahara, Yasuo Okabe, Naoaki Okazaki
AACL-IJCNLP 2026 Findings, Nov 2026
- 5
Jagle: Building a Large-Scale Japanese Multimodal Post-Training Dataset for Vision-Language Models
Issa Sugiura, Keito Sasagawa, Keisuke Nakao, Koki Maeda, Ziqi Yin, Zhishen Yang, Shuhei Kurita, Yusuke Oda, Ryoko Tokuhisa, Daisuke Kawahara, Naoaki Okazaki
COLM 2026, Oct 2026
- 6
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- 9
- 10
- 11
Preprints
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
LLM-jp: A Cross-organizational Project for the Research and Development of Fully Open Japanese LLMs
LLM-jp (incl. Issa Sugiura; 80 authors, listed in alphabetical order)
arXiv, Jul 2024
Domestic conferences (non-refereed)
- 1
- 2
Jagle: 視覚言語モデルのための大規模日本語マルチモーダル事後学習データセットの構築
全国大会優秀賞杉浦一瑳, 笹川慶人, 中尾圭佑, 前田航希, Yin Ziqi, Yang Zhishen, 栗田修平, 小田悠介, 徳久良子, 河原大輔, 岡崎直観
JSAI2026, 2026年6月
- 3
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- 5
WAON: 視覚言語モデルのための大規模かつ高品質な日本語画像・テキスト対データセット
委員特別賞杉浦一瑳, 栗田修平, 小田悠介, 河原大輔, 岡部寿男, 岡崎直観
NLP2026, 2026年3月
- 6
Common Crawlを用いた大規模音声音響データセットの構築
浅井航平, 杉浦一瑳, 中田亘, 栗田修平, 高道慎之介, 小川哲司, 東中竜一郎
日本音響学会 2025年秋季研究発表会, 2025年9月
- 7
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- 10
LLM-jp-3 VILA: 日本語マルチモーダルデータセット及び強力な日本語マルチモーダルモデルの構築
委員特別賞笹川慶人, 前田航希, 杉浦一瑳, 栗田修平, 岡崎直観, 河原大輔
NLP2025, 2025年3月
- 11
Awards
Honors
- Jun 2026
JSAI Annual Conference Award
Jagle: Building a Large-Scale Japanese Multimodal Post-Training Dataset for VLMs
JSAI2026
- Mar 2026
Best Paper Award (3/789, top 0.4%)
Llama-Mimi: Speech Language Models with Interleaved Semantic and Acoustic Tokens
NLP2026
- Mar 2026
Special Committee Award (32/748, top 4.3%)
WAON: Large-Scale and High-Quality Japanese Image-Text Pair Dataset for VLMs
NLP2026
- Mar 2025
Special Committee Award (32/726, top 4.4%)
LLM-jp-3 VILA: Building a Japanese Multimodal Dataset and a Strong Japanese Multimodal Model
NLP2025
- Feb 2024
LINE Yahoo Sponsor Award (1/420, top 0.24%)
Improving Generalization of Trained Models via Unlearning of Mislabeled Data
DEIM2024
Fellowships and scholarships
- Jul 2026
Full Repayment Exemption for Outstanding Achievement
JASSO graduate scholarship
Japan Student Services Organization
- Apr 2026
Science Tokyo Support Program for Doctoral Students
Doctoral research fellowship (JST SPRING)
Institute of Science Tokyo
Models and systems
- 1
LLM-jp-4-VL 9B series (2026)
Developed a 9B Japanese vision-language model extending the Japanese LLM LLM-jp-4 8B Thinking. To build this model, also constructed the training datasets Jagle, the largest-scale Japanese multimodal dataset, and RefinedVision, a refined version of FineVision addressing its license and quality issues.
- 2
simple-evals-mm (2026)
Developed a simple and extensible VLM evaluation framework, extending OpenAI's simple-evals to multimodal evaluation with Japanese and English benchmarks.
Certifications
- Oct 19, 2025 TOEIC L&R: L 420 + R 425 = 845
- Aug 2022 Security Camp organized by IPA (Information-technology Promotion Agency), Web Security Course