Naoto Iwase

岩瀬 直人

Portrait of Naoto Iwase

Naoto Iwase is a medical student at Nagoya University and an incoming visiting student at Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI). He previously worked as a part-time engineer at Preferred Networks, Inc.

His research focuses on making large language models more reliable and useful in medicine. He develops methods and benchmarks for reliable LLM reasoning, including anytime-valid statistical inference for self-consistency, prefix-consistency evaluation for chain-of-thought reasoning, and clinical text error correction.

He also writes ML Notes, a collection of survey-style notes on recent machine learning papers.

Publications

  1. Reliable Chain-of-Thought via Prefix Consistency

    Naoto Iwase, Yuki Ichihara, Mohammad Atif Quamar, Junpei Komiyama.

    arXiv 2026

    Correct chain-of-thought traces reproduce their answer under prefix regeneration more often than wrong ones; weighting majority voting by this prefix consistency reaches plateau accuracy at up to 21× fewer tokens (median 4.6×).

  2. CITE: Anytime-Valid Statistical Inference in LLM Self-Consistency

    Hirofumi Ota, Naoto Iwase, Yuki Ichihara, Junpei Komiyama, Masaaki Imaizumi.

    arXiv 2026

    CITE certifies a prespecified answer as the unique mode under arbitrary data-dependent stopping, while controlling false certification without knowing the response category set in advance.

  3. MedRECT: A Medical Reasoning Benchmark for Error Correction in Clinical Texts

    Naoto Iwase, Hiroki Okuyama, Junichiro Iwasawa.

    arXiv 2025

    A bilingual (Japanese/English) benchmark for medical error correction built from licensing exams; across 9 LLMs, reasoning models substantially outperform standard architectures, and a fine-tuned model exceeds human expert performance.

Awards & Honors