Chiori Hori

Chiori Hori
Chiori's Quick Links

  • Biography

    Chiori has been a member of MERL's research team since 2015. Her work is focused on spoken dialog and audio visual scene-aware dialog technologies toward human-robot communications. She's on the editorial board of "Computer Speech and Language" and is a technical committee member of "Speech and Language Processing Group" of IEEE Signal Processing Society. Prior to joining MERL, Chiori spent 8 years at Japan's National Institute of Information and Communication Technology (NICT), where she held the position of Research Manager of the Spoken Language Communication Laboratory. She also spent time researching at Carnegie Mellon and the NTT Communication Science Laboratories, prior to NICT.

  • Recent News & Events

    •  NEWS    MERL Researchers at NeurIPS 2025 presented 2 conference papers, 5 workshop papers, and organized a workshop.
      Date: December 2, 2025 - December 7, 2025
      Where: San Diego
      MERL Contacts: Petros T. Boufounos; Anoop Cherian; Radu Corcodel; Stefano Di Cairano; Chiori Hori; Christopher R. Laughman; Suhas Anand Lohit; Pedro Miraldo; Saviz Mowlavi; Kuan-Chuan Peng; Arvind Raghunathan; Diego Romeres; Yuki Shirai; Abraham P. Vinod; Pu (Perry) Wang
      Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Computational Sensing, Computer Vision, Control, Data Analytics, Dynamical Systems, Machine Learning, Multi-Physical Modeling, Optimization, Robotics, Signal Processing, Speech & Audio
      Brief
      • MERL researchers presented 2 main-conference papers and 5 workshop papers, as well as organized a workshop, at NeurIPS 2025.

        Main Conference Papers:

        1) Sorachi Kato, Ryoma Yataka, Pu Wang, Pedro Miraldo, Takuya Fujihashi, and Petros Boufounos, "RAPTR: Radar-based 3D Pose Estimation using Transformer", Code available at: https://github.com/merlresearch/radar-pose-transformer

        2) Runyu Zhang, Arvind Raghunathan, Jeff Shamma, and Na Li, "Constrained Optimization From a Control Perspective via Feedback Linearization"

        Workshop Papers:

        1) Yuyou Zhang, Radu Corcodel, Chiori Hori, Anoop Cherian, and Ding Zhao, "SpinBench: Perspective and Rotation as a Lens on Spatial Reasoning in VLMs", NeuriIPS 2025 Workshop on SPACE in Vision, Language, and Embodied AI (SpaVLE) (Best Paper Runner-up)

        2) Xiaoyu Xie, Saviz Mowlavi, and Mouhacine Benosman, "Smooth and Sparse Latent Dynamics in Operator Learning with Jerk Regularization", Workshop on Machine Learning and the Physical Sciences (ML4PS)

        3) Spencer Hutchinson, Abraham Vinod, François Germain, Stefano Di Cairano, Christopher Laughman, and Ankush Chakrabarty, "Quantile-SMPC for Grid-Interactive Buildings with Multivariate Temporal Fusion Transformers", Workshop on UrbanAI: Harnessing Artificial Intelligence for Smart Cities (UrbanAI)

        4) Yuki Shirai, Kei Ota, Devesh Jha, and Diego Romeres, "Sim-to-Real Contact-Rich Pivoting via Optimization-Guided RL with Vision and Touch", Worskhop on Embodied World Models for Decision Making

        5) Mark Van der Merwe and Devesh Jha, "In-Context Policy Iteration for Dynamic Manipulation", Workshop on Embodied World Models for Decision Making

        Workshop Organized:

        MERL members co-organized the Multimodal Algorithmic Reasoning (MAR) Workshop (https://marworkshop.github.io/neurips25/). Organizers: Anoop Cherian (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Kuan-Chuan Peng (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Suhas Lohit (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Honglu Zhou (Salesforce AI Research), Kevin Smith (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), and Joshua B. Tenenbaum (Massachusetts Institute of Technology).
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    •  NEWS    MERL contributes to ICRA 2025
      Date: May 19, 2025 - May 23, 2025
      Where: IEEE ICRA
      MERL Contacts: Stefano Di Cairano; Jianlin Guo; Chiori Hori; Siddarth Jain; Toshiaki Koike-Akino; Philip V. Orlik; Arvind Raghunathan; Diego Romeres; Yuki Shirai; Abraham P. Vinod; Yebin Wang
      Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision, Control, Dynamical Systems, Machine Learning, Optimization, Robotics, Human-Computer Interaction
      Brief
      • MERL made significant contributions to both the organization and the technical program of the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2025, which was held in Atlanta, Georgia, USA, from May 19th to May 23rd.

        MERL was a Bronze sponsor of the conference, and MERL researchers chaired four sessions in the areas of Manipulation Planning, Human-Robot Collaboration, Diffusion Policy, and Learning for Robot Control.

        MERL researchers presented four papers in the main conference on the topics of contact-implicit trajectory optimization, proactive robotic assistance in human-robot collaboration, diffusion policy with human preferences, and dynamic and model learning of robotic manipulators. In addition, five more papers were presented in the workshops: “Structured Learning for Efficient, Reliable, and Transparent Robots,” “Safely Leveraging Vision-Language Foundation Models in Robotics: Challenges and Opportunities,” “Long-term Human Motion Prediction,” and “The Future of Intelligent Manufacturing: From Innovation to Implementation.”

        MERL researcher Diego Romeres delivered an invited talk titled “Dexterous Robotics: From Multimodal Sensing to Real-World Physical Interactions.”

        MERL also collaborated with the University of Padua on one of the conference’s challenges: the “3rd AI Olympics with RealAIGym” (https://ai-olympics.dfki-bremen.de).

        During the conference, MERL researchers received the IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering Best New Application Paper Award for their paper titled “Smart Actuation for End-Edge Industrial Control Systems.”

        About ICRA

        The IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) is the flagship conference of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society and the world’s largest and most comprehensive technical conference focused on research advances and the latest technological developments in robotics. The event attracts over 7,000 participants, 143 partners and exhibitors, and receives more than 4,000 paper submissions.
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  • Awards

    •  AWARD    Honorable Mention Award at NeurIPS 23 Instruction Workshop
      Date: December 15, 2023
      Awarded to: Lingfeng Sun, Devesh K. Jha, Chiori Hori, Siddharth Jain, Radu Corcodel, Xinghao Zhu, Masayoshi Tomizuka and Diego Romeres
      MERL Contacts: Radu Corcodel; Chiori Hori; Siddarth Jain; Diego Romeres
      Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Robotics
      Brief
      • MERL Researchers received an "Honorable Mention award" at the Workshop on Instruction Tuning and Instruction Following at the NeurIPS 2023 conference in New Orleans. The workshop was on the topic of instruction tuning and Instruction following for Large Language Models (LLMs). MERL researchers presented their work on interactive planning using LLMs for partially observable robotic tasks during the oral presentation session at the workshop.
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    •  AWARD    MERL team wins the Audio-Visual Speech Enhancement (AVSE) 2023 Challenge
      Date: December 16, 2023
      Awarded to: Zexu Pan, Gordon Wichern, Yoshiki Masuyama, Francois Germain, Sameer Khurana, Chiori Hori, and Jonathan Le Roux
      MERL Contacts: Chiori Hori; Jonathan Le Roux; Gordon Wichern; Yoshiki Masuyama
      Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Speech & Audio
      Brief
      • MERL's Speech & Audio team ranked 1st out of 12 teams in the 2nd COG-MHEAR Audio-Visual Speech Enhancement Challenge (AVSE). The team was led by Zexu Pan, and also included Gordon Wichern, Yoshiki Masuyama, Francois Germain, Sameer Khurana, Chiori Hori, and Jonathan Le Roux.

        The AVSE challenge aims to design better speech enhancement systems by harnessing the visual aspects of speech (such as lip movements and gestures) in a manner similar to the brain’s multi-modal integration strategies. MERL’s system was a scenario-aware audio-visual TF-GridNet, that incorporates the face recording of a target speaker as a conditioning factor and also recognizes whether the predominant interference signal is speech or background noise. In addition to outperforming all competing systems in terms of objective metrics by a wide margin, in a listening test, MERL’s model achieved the best overall word intelligibility score of 84.54%, compared to 57.56% for the baseline and 80.41% for the next best team. The Fisher’s least significant difference (LSD) was 2.14%, indicating that our model offered statistically significant speech intelligibility improvements compared to all other systems.
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  • Research Highlights

  • Internships with Chiori

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  • MERL Publications

    •  Zhang, Y., Corcodel, R., Hori, C., Cherian, A., Zhao, D., "AxisBench: What Can Go Wrong in VLMs’ Spatial Reasoning?", Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) workshop, December 2025.
      BibTeX TR2025-168 PDF
      • @inproceedings{Zhang2025dec2,
      • author = {{{Zhang, Yuyou and Corcodel, Radu and Hori, Chiori and Cherian, Anoop and Zhao, Ding}}},
      • title = {{{AxisBench: What Can Go Wrong in VLMs’ Spatial Reasoning?}}},
      • booktitle = {Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) workshop},
      • year = 2025,
      • month = dec,
      • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2025-168}
      • }
    •  Hori, C., Masuyama, Y., Jain, S., Corcodel, R., Jha, D.K., Romeres, D., Le Roux, J., "Robot Confirmation Generation and Action Planning Using Long-context Q-Former Integrated with Multimodal LLM", IEEE Workshop on Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding (ASRU), December 2025.
      BibTeX TR2025-167 PDF
      • @inproceedings{Hori2025dec,
      • author = {Hori, Chiori and Masuyama, Yoshiki and Jain, Siddarth and Corcodel, Radu and Jha, Devesh K. and Romeres, Diego and {Le Roux}, Jonathan},
      • title = {{Robot Confirmation Generation and Action Planning Using Long-context Q-Former Integrated with Multimodal LLM}},
      • booktitle = {IEEE Workshop on Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding (ASRU)},
      • year = 2025,
      • month = dec,
      • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2025-167}
      • }
    •  Zhang, Y., Corcodel, R., Hori, C., Cherian, A., Zhao, D., "SpinBench: Perspective and Rotation as a Lens on Spatial Reasoning in VLMs", arXiv, September 2025.
      BibTeX arXiv
      • @article{Zhang2025sep3,
      • author = {Zhang, Yuyou and Corcodel, Radu and Hori, Chiori and Cherian, Anoop and Zhao, Ding},
      • title = {{SpinBench: Perspective and Rotation as a Lens on Spatial Reasoning in VLMs}},
      • journal = {arXiv},
      • year = 2025,
      • month = sep,
      • url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.25390}
      • }
    •  Khurana, S., Klement, D., Laurent, A., Bobos, D., Novosad, J., Gazdik, P., Zhang, E., Huang, Z., Hussein, A., Marxer, R., Masuyama, Y., Aihara, R., Hori, C., Germain, F.G., Wichern, G., Le Roux, J., "Factorized RVQ-GAN For Disentangled Speech Tokenization", Interspeech, DOI: 10.21437/​Interspeech.2025-2612, August 2025, pp. 3514-3518.
      BibTeX TR2025-123 PDF
      • @inproceedings{Khurana2025aug,
      • author = {Khurana, Sameer and Klement, Dominik and Laurent, Antoine and Bobos, Dominik and Novosad, Juraj and Gazdik, Peter and Zhang, Ellen and Huang, Zilli and Hussein, Amir and Marxer, Ricard and Masuyama, Yoshiki and Aihara, Ryo and Hori, Chiori and Germain, François G and Wichern, Gordon and {Le Roux}, Jonathan},
      • title = {{Factorized RVQ-GAN For Disentangled Speech Tokenization}},
      • booktitle = {Interspeech},
      • year = 2025,
      • pages = {3514--3518},
      • month = aug,
      • publisher = {ISCA},
      • doi = {10.21437/Interspeech.2025-2612},
      • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2025-123}
      • }
    •  Lu, K., Ma, C., Hori, C., Romeres, D., "KitchenVLA: Iterative Vision-Language Corrections for Robotic Execution of Human Tasks", IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation Workshop on Safely Leveraging Vision-Language Foundation Models in Robotics (SafeLVMs@ICRA), May 2025.
      BibTeX TR2025-068 PDF
      • @inproceedings{Lu2025may,
      • author = {Lu, Kai and Ma, Chenyang and Hori, Chiori and Romeres, Diego},
      • title = {{KitchenVLA: Iterative Vision-Language Corrections for Robotic Execution of Human Tasks}},
      • booktitle = {IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation Workshop on Safely Leveraging Vision-Language Foundation Models in Robotics (SafeLVMs@ICRA)},
      • year = 2025,
      • month = may,
      • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2025-068}
      • }
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  • Software & Data Downloads

  • Videos

  • MERL Issued Patents

    • Title: "Long-context End-to-end Speech Recognition System"
      Inventors: Hori, Takaaki; Moritz, Niko; Hori, Chiori; Le Roux, Jonathan
      Patent No.: 11,978,435
      Issue Date: May 7, 2024
    • Title: "System and Method for Using Human Relationship Structures for Email Classification"
      Inventors: Harsham, Bret A.; Hori, Chiori
      Patent No.: 11,651,222
      Issue Date: May 16, 2023
    • Title: "Method and System for Scene-Aware Interaction"
      Inventors: Hori, Chiori; Cherian, Anoop; Chen, Siheng; Marks, Tim; Le Roux, Jonathan; Hori, Takaaki; Harsham, Bret A.; Vetro, Anthony; Sullivan, Alan
      Patent No.: 11,635,299
      Issue Date: Apr 25, 2023
    • Title: "Scene-Aware Video Encoder System and Method"
      Inventors: Cherian, Anoop; Hori, Chiori; Le Roux, Jonathan; Marks, Tim; Sullivan, Alan
      Patent No.: 11,582,485
      Issue Date: Feb 14, 2023
    • Title: "Low-latency Captioning System"
      Inventors: Hori, Chiori; Hori, Takaaki; Cherian, Anoop; Marks, Tim; Le Roux, Jonathan
      Patent No.: 11,445,267
      Issue Date: Sep 13, 2022
    • Title: "System and Method for a Dialogue Response Generation System"
      Inventors: Hori, Chiori; Cherian, Anoop; Marks, Tim; Hori, Takaaki
      Patent No.: 11,264,009
      Issue Date: Mar 1, 2022
    • Title: "Scene-Aware Video Dialog"
      Inventors: Geng, Shijie; Gao, Peng; Cherian, Anoop; Hori, Chiori; Le Roux, Jonathan
      Patent No.: 11,210,523
      Issue Date: Dec 28, 2021
    • Title: "Method and System for Multi-Label Classification"
      Inventors: Hori, Takaaki; Hori, Chiori; Watanabe, Shinji; Hershey, John R.; Harsham, Bret A.; Le Roux, Jonathan
      Patent No.: 11,086,918
      Issue Date: Aug 10, 2021
    • Title: "Position Estimation Under Multipath Transmission"
      Inventors: Kim, Kyeong-Jin; Orlik, Philip V.; Hori, Chiori
      Patent No.: 11,079,495
      Issue Date: Aug 3, 2021
    • Title: "Method and System for Multi-Modal Fusion Model"
      Inventors: Hori, Chiori; Hori, Takaaki; Hershey, John R.; Marks, Tim
      Patent No.: 10,417,498
      Issue Date: Sep 17, 2019
    • Title: "Method and System for Training Language Models to Reduce Recognition Errors"
      Inventors: Hori, Takaaki; Hori, Chiori; Watanabe, Shinji; Hershey, John R.
      Patent No.: 10,176,799
      Issue Date: Jan 8, 2019
    • Title: "Method and System for Role Dependent Context Sensitive Spoken and Textual Language Understanding with Neural Networks"
      Inventors: Hori, Chiori; Hori, Takaaki; Watanabe, Shinji; Hershey, John R.
      Patent No.: 9,842,106
      Issue Date: Dec 12, 2017
    See All Patents for MERL