Yuri Ishitoya

Yuri Ishitoya

PhD Student at Vislang Lab,
Dept. of Computer Science,
Rice University

Hi! I am a first-year Computer Science Ph.D. student at the Vislang Lab, Rice University, advised by Prof. Vicente Ordóñez. Before joining Rice, I received my B.S. in Information Science from Ochanomizu University, where I was advised by Prof. Ichiro Kobayashi. My research interests lie in low-resource vision-language models (VLMs) and vision-language-action (VLA) models.

My CV is available here.
Feel free to reach out by email at yuuri.isty[at]gmail.com! ✉️

Publications

Preprints

  • Ishitoya, Y.*, Siburian, J.*, Hamaya, M., Saito, K., Beltran-Hernandez, C. C., & Nishimura, M*. (2026). CLAP: Direct VLM-to-VLA Adaptation via Language-Action Grounding. arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.08974
  • Ishitoya, Y., Flores, V., Yang, Z., Cascante-Bonilla, P., & Ordonez, V. (2025). Evaluating Vision-Language Models through a Human-Centered Benchmark. Preprint / draft

* Equal contribution.

Papers

  • Ishitoya, Y., & Kobayashi, I. (2026). Mitigating Statistical and Causal Bias Through Output Embedding Operations. In Proceedings of NLP2026. (in Japanese)
  • Ishida, K., Ishitoya, Y., Kobayashi, I., & Igarashi, Y. (2025). A Study on the Usefulness of an Interviewer Support System that Points Out Gender-Based Judgments. In Proceedings of IPSJ SIG-HCI 212. (in Japanese)
  • Ishida, K., Ishitoya, Y., Kobayashi, I., & Igarashi, Y. (2025). Proposal and Development of an AI Interviewer Support System that Points Out Gender-Based Judgments. In Proceedings of JSAI2025. (in Japanese). DOI
  • Ishitoya, Y., & Kobayashi, I. (2025). A Study on Detecting Subtle Biases by Expanding the Log-Likelihood into a Frequency Space. In Proceedings of JSAI2025. (in Japanese). DOI
  • Ishitoya, Y., & Ito, T. (2024). Analysis of the Causes of the Gender Gap through Data Comparison and Visualization by the 47 Prefectures. In Proceedings of JSAI2024. (in Japanese). DOI

Funding & Awards

Funding

  • Tobitate! Study Abroad Initiative, 2025
    • Japan Ministry of Education, Japan
    • Selected as 1 of 263 awardees out of 1,187 applicants (22.1% acceptance rate)
  • MITOU IT Program, 2023
    • Information-technology Promotion Agency (IPA), Japan
    • Selected as one of 21 projects out of 153 applications nationwide in FY2023 (13.7% acceptance rate)
  • Women Leaders Support Fund, 2023
    • Public Resource Foundation, Japan
    • Selected as one of 6 recipients out of 103 applicants (6.8% acceptance rate)

Awards

  • Oin-kai Research Encouragement Award, Ochanomizu University (2025)
  • Pre-Graduation Research Excellence Award, Ochanomizu University (2024)

Education

  • Rice University, USA — Ph.D. in Computer Science, Aug 2026 – Present
  • Ochanomizu University, Japan — M.S. Program in Information Science, Apr 2025 – Aug 2026
  • Ochanomizu University, Japan — B.S. in Information Science, Apr 2021 – Mar 2025