Human Interactive Driving Intern – World Models

At Toyota Research Institute (TRI), we’re on a mission to improve the quality of human life. We’re developing new tools and capabilities to amplify the human experience. This is a paid 12-week internship opportunity and is a hybrid, in-office role. As a Ph.D. Research Intern, you will conduct original research at the intersection of machine learning and autonomous driving. Your work may focus on developing novel components of world models, improving decision-making through model-based RL, advancing 3D perception for dynamic scenes, or enhancing simulation-to-reality transfer. You’ll have the opportunity to prototype and evaluate your ideas in closed-loop simulations and contribute to research publications alongside TRI scientists.

Responsibilities

Conduct original research in one or more areas: world modeling, multi-agent interaction, reinforcement learning, perception, or simulation-to-reality transfer; Collaborate closely with full-time researchers on the design, training, and evaluation of learning-based driving systems; Contribute to building and experimenting with task-aware, multi-modal, and uncertainty-aware models; Develop and evaluate prototypes in closed-loop simulation environments and, time permitting, on high-performance autonomous driving hardware; Present research findings through internal talks and work towards a top-tier academic publication; Integrate and work with large-scale datasets (open-source and internal)

Requirements

Currently enrolled in a Ph.D. program in Computer Science, Robotics, Machine Learning, or a related field; Strong background in machine learning, particularly in deep learning, generative models, reinforcement learning, or probabilistic modeling; Demonstrated experience with world models, model-based RL or decision-making, 3D perception or sensor fusion, and large-scale simulation for robotics or autonomous systems; Prior publication(s) in top-tier conferences (NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, CVPR, ICRA, CoRL, etc.); Proficiency with Python and PyTorch; Include links to any relevant open-source contributions or technical project write-ups with your application

Nice to have

Familiarity with AWS services (S3, EC2, and SageMaker) and open-source driving datasets (nuScenes, Waymo, Argoverse, etc.); Good collaboration skills

Benefits

Generous benefits package; medical, dental, and vision insurance; paid time off benefits (including holiday pay and sick time)