Naoki Wake
I'm a researcher working across neuroscience, robotics, and AI, currently at Microsoft.
Writing
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SharedKV-BT: fast typed decisions for behavior-tree agents
The tree decides what the model may choose, and an external check decides when to move on.
Selected papers
- SharedKV-BT: Node-local typed decisions for behavior-tree agents
- GPT-4V(ision) for robotics: Multimodal task planning from human demonstration
- ChatGPT empowered long-step robot control in various environments: A case application
- Semantic constraints to represent common sense required in household actions for multimodal learning-from-observation robot
- Open-vocabulary action localization with iterative visual prompting
- Modality-driven design for multi-step dexterous manipulation: Insights from neuroscience
Experience and education
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2026 to now
Senior Researcher, Microsoft
LLM pretraining, training recipes, and model optimization.
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2025 to 2026
Senior Research Scientist, Honda Research Institute USA
Dexterous, contact-rich manipulation with large models and learned policies, in simulation and on real robots.
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2019 to 2025
Senior Research Scientist, Microsoft
LLM- and VLM-based robot teaching and mobile manipulation for humanoid robots, customer deployments on Azure, and mentoring 20 interns and junior researchers.
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2019
Research Scientist, IBM Research Tokyo
Biomarkers for the early detection of dementia.
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2010 to 2019
The University of Tokyo
PhD and MS in Information Science and Technology, BS in Engineering (Mechano-informatics).
Earlier: research internships at Microsoft and IBM Research in Tokyo, and a visiting fellowship at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.