Masaru Isonuma is a JSPS Overseas Research Fellow (postdoc) at the University of Edinburgh, working with Prof. Ivan Titov. His research focuses on the training data of language models (LMs), investigating which training data influences LMs' performance, what LMs fundamentally learn from the data, and how to optimize it. Prior to joining the Edinburgh NLP group, he earned his PhD from the University of Tokyo, where he studied text summarization and topic models under the supervision of Ichiro Sakata, Junichiro Mori, and Danushka Bollegala.
Work Experiences
Apr. 2023-Present: JSPS Overseas Research Fellow, The University of Edinburgh
Apr. 2024-Present: Visiting Assistant Professor, National Institute of Informatics
Apr. 2023-Present: Visiting Researcher, The University of Tokyo
Apr. 2022-Mar. 2023: Project Assistant Professor, The University of Tokyo
Nov. 2021-Mar. 2022: Postdoctoral Researcher, The University of Tokyo
Apr. 2020-Oct. 2021: JSPS Research Fellow, The University of Tokyo
Apr. 2017-Sep. 2018: Professional Staff, Industrial Growth Platform, Inc.
Education & Qualifications
Oct. 2018-Sep. 2021: Ph.D. (Engineering), The University of Tokyo
Apr. 2015-Mar. 2017: M.S., The University of Tokyo
Apr. 2011-Mar. 2015: B.S., The University of Tokyo
Selected Publications
Huimin LU, Masaru Isonuma, Junichiro Mori, Ichiro Sakata. UniDetox: Universal Detoxification of Large Language Models via Dataset Distillation. The Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2025. [paper]
Masaru Isonuma, Ivan Titov. What's New in My Data? Novelty Exploration via Contrastive Generation. The Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2025. [paper]
Masaru Isonuma, Ivan Titov. Unlearning Traces the Influential Training Data of Language Models. Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL, long paper), pp.6312-6325, 2024. [paper, code]
Tetsu Kasanishi, Masaru Isonuma, Junichiro Mori, Ichiro Sakata. SciReviewGen: A Large-scale Dataset for Automatic Literature Review Generation. Findings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Findings of ACL, long paper), pp.6695–6715, 2023. [paper, code]
Nozomu Miyamoto, Masaru Isonuma, Sho Takase, Junichiro Mori, Ichiro Sakata. Dynamic Structured Neural Topic Model with Self-Attention Mechanism. Findings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Findings of ACL, long paper), pp.5916–5930, 2023. [paper, code]
Masaru Isonuma, Junichiro Mori, Ichiro Sakata. Differentiable Instruction Optimization for Cross-Task Generalization. Findings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Findings of ACL, Long Paper), pp.10502–10517, 2023. [paper, code]
Naomi Sato, Masaru Isonuma, Kimitaka Asatani, Shoya Ishizuka, Aori Shimizu and Ichiro Sakata. Lexical Entailment with Hierarchy Representations by Deep Metric Learning. Findings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Findings of EMNLP, short paper), pp.3517–3522, 2022. [paper]
Masaru Isonuma, Junichiro Mori, Danushka Bollegala, Ichiro Sakata. Unsupervised Abstractive Opinion Summarization by Generating Sentences with Tree-Structured Topic Guidance. Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics (TACL), vol.9, pp.945–961, 2021. [paper, code]
Masaru Isonuma, Junichiro Mori, Danushka Bollegala, Ichiro Sakata. Tree-Structured Neural Topic Model. Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL, Short Paper), pp.800-806, 2020. [paper, code]
Masaru Isonuma, Junichiro Mori, Ichiro Sakata. Unsupervised Neural Single-Document Summarization of Reviews via Learning Latent Discourse Structure and its Ranking. Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL, Long Paper), pp.2142–2152, 2019. [paper, code]
Masaru Isonuma, Toru Fujino, Junichiro Mori, Yutaka Matsuo, Ichiro Sakata. Extractive Summarization using Multi-Task Learning with Document Classification. Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP, Long Paper), pp.2101–2110, 2017. [paper]
Awards
Outstanding Paper Award, The 31st Annual Meeting of the Association for Natural Language Processing, 2025. (co-author, 15/765 papers)
Sponsor Award (SB Intuitions Corp.), The 31st Annual Meeting of the Association for Natural Language Processing, 2025. (co-author, 1/??? papers)
Sponsor Award (ELYZA, Inc.), The 31st Annual Meeting of the Association for Natural Language Processing, 2025. (co-author, 1/??? papers)
Best Paper Award, The 30th Annual Meeting of the Association for Natural Language Processing, 2024. (first author, 1/599 papers)
JSAI Annual Conference Award, The 37th Annual Conference of the Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence, 2023. (first author, 38/954 papers)
Outstanding Paper Award, The 29th Annual Meeting of the Association for Natural Language Processing, 2023. (co-author, 13/579 papers)
Yamashita SIG Research Award, Information Processing Society of Japan, 2022. (first author, 1/33 papers)
Dean's Award for the Best Doctoral Thesis, Graduate School of Engineering, The University of Tokyo, 2022.
Young Researcher Encouragement Award, The 27th Annual Meeting of the Association for Natural Language Processing, 2021. (first author, 11/247 papers)
Excellence Award, Special Interest Group of Natural Language Processing, 2020. (first author, 2/22 papers)
Grants & Fellowships
JST BOOST (Broadening Opportunities for Outstanding young researchers in Strategic areas)
JSPS Overseas Research Fellowships
JSPS Grant-in-Aid for Early-Career Scientists
JST ACT-X Acceleration Phase (Frontier of Mathematics and Information Science)
JST ACT-X (Frontier of Mathematics and Information Science)
JSPS Research Fellowships for Young Scientists (Doctoral Course 2)
TOYOTA/Dwango Scholarship for Advanced Artificial Intelligence Researcher
JSPS Overseas Challenge Program for Young Researchers (declined due to COVID-19)
UTokyo-TOYOTA Study Abroad Scholarships for Advanced Artificial Intelligence Researcher (declined due to COVID-19)
SEUT Doctoral Student Special Incentives Program (Type A)
Peer Review Contributions
ACL Rolling Review (ARR): 2023-2024 (Reviewer), 2025 (Area Chair)
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR): 2025 (Reviewer)
Nature Communications: 2024 (Reviewer)
Journal of Natural Language Processing: 2022 (Reviewer), 2023-2025 (Reviewer/Editorial Committee)
Annual Meeting of the Association for Natural Language Processing: 2022-2024 (Reviewer)