PhD/Postdoc Research Opportunity in LLMs, Culture, Persona, and Interpretability at Kyoto University Kyoto University in Japan

Kyoto University’s Language Media Processing Lab in the Department of Intelligence Science and Technology is seeking candidates for a research opportunity under the JST LOTUS / LOTUS-ASPIRE programme.

The lab’s research themes include LLMs and culture, LLM persona, and LLM interpretability, with a broader NLP and language understanding focus. The lab page also highlights work in text understanding, machine translation, information retrieval, and deep natural language processing.

This call is aimed at applicants who are currently enrolled as a graduate student, doctoral student, or postdoctoral fellow at an Indian university or research institute, preferably from IITs/IISc. The post says PhD or postdoc candidates are preferred, and strong research experience is a plus, especially first-authored publications at ACL venues. The Kyoto lab page further notes that PhD applicants should already have top NLP conference publications as first author and be able to communicate in English or Japanese.

Funding is through JST LOTUS. LOTUS Basic provides a monthly allowance of 275,000 JPY for up to 1 year (including overhead). LOTUS-ASPIRE provides up to 22 million JPY per person for up to 3 years, covering living and research expenses. The position is not final until the proposal is accepted by the LOTUS programme committee.

The JST call deadline is 2026-06-09. Interested candidates should first submit the Google Form linked in the post, then the Japanese PI will submit the formal application through e-Rad after matching with a suitable candidate.