Research Associate, Robotics

Hire Art is helping our client find a Research Associate to join its Learning from Videos (LFV) team and contribute to research advancing world models, video generation, and policy learning capabilities.

In this role, you'll work with the LFV team to advance world models, video generation, and policy learning while contributing to a shared internal research codebase. Your work will include establishing state-of-the-art baselines, training large-scale models, evaluating performance in simulation and on real robotic hardware, and developing novel approaches to address performance gaps, with contributions supporting top-tier research publications and practical embodied intelligence applications.

The ideal candidate is a PhD student working in a related research field with strong technical foundations in computer vision, video understanding, generative models, 3D reconstruction, or robotics. You're proactive, self-directed, and comfortable contributing both to cutting-edge research and the high-quality software infrastructure needed to support it.
As Research Associate, you'll:

• Contribute to research on multimodal and multi-view world models, video generation, video policies, and related areas, including ongoing projects, university partnerships, research meetings, and publications for top-tier conferences.
• Contribute to the team's internal video generation codebase, Any4
  
  Dv3, by maintaining high-quality code, reviewing pull requests, stress-testing new capabilities, developing new functionality, and supporting ongoing development.
• Advance research in world-action models (WAMs) within Any4
  
  Dv3 by benchmarking state-of-the-art methods, deploying solutions in simulation and on real robotic hardware, identifying gaps in current technologies, and developing approaches to address them.
• Produce maintainable, well-documented code and contribute to internal tooling and open-source releases for the scientific community.

• Current PhD student in a related field
• Strong fundamentals in at least one of the following areas: computer vision, video understanding, generative models, 3D reconstruction, or robotics
• Experience with video diffusion models, world models, and world-action models
• Proactive and self-directed, with the ability to operate effectively in a research-driven environment
• Strong communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to take ownership of problems from end to end

• A track record of contributions to open-source projects or publications at top-tier venues such as CVPR, ICLR, NeurIPS, RSS, or ICRA

This is a part-time (20 hours per week), 6-month contract position staffed via Hire Art. It will be onsite and available to candidates local to the Los Altos, CA area.

Hire Art provides Equal Employment Opportunity without regard to the applicant's race, color, creed, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, age, physical or mental disability, medical condition, religion, marital status, genetic information, veteran status, or any other status protected under federal, state or local laws.

At Toyota Research Institute (TRI), we’re working to build a future where everyone has the freedom to move, engage, and explore with a focus on reducing vehicle collisions, injuries, and fatalities. Join us in our mission to improve the quality of human life through advances in artificial intelligence, automated driving, robotics and materials science. We’re dedicated to building a world of “mobility for all” where everyone, regardless of age or ability, can live in harmony with technology to enjoy a better life.

Through innovations in AI, we’ll develop vehicles incapable of causing a crash, regardless of the actions…