On 23rd July 2026, Ryosuke Takata, Project Researcher at Izumi Laboratory, Department of Systems Innovation, received the 2026 JSAI Annual Conference Award.
JSAI Annual Conference Award
This award is given to the authors of particularly outstanding research presented at the Annual Conference of the Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence.
About awarded research
“Implementation of Inner Speech in LLM Persona Agents and Verification of Social Coordination Capabilities”
In this study, we proposed a method that introduces inner speech into the decision-making of LLM persona agents as an internal thought loop independent of their behavioral output. Existing agents generate responses relatively directly from their inputs, which makes it difficult to reproduce the distinction between honne (true feelings) and tatemae (public stance) seen in human society. Through experiments on social interaction scenarios involving conflicts of opinion and coordination of interests, we showed that agents with inner speech convert emotional resistance into socially appropriate expressions and generate responses that reach constructive compromises without simply going along with the other party.
Your impression & future plan
I am deeply honored to receive this prestigious award. I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my co-authors, Momoka Okayama and Prof. Kiyoshi Izumi, and to everyone at Dai Nippon Printing Co., Ltd. for their support. Encouraged by this award, I will continue working to advance research on agents with more human-like social abilities.