Human Interactive Driving Research Intern, World Models

Paid 12-week hybrid, in-office internship with Toyota Research Institute (TRI). The intern will join the Extreme Performance Intelligent Control (EPIC) team in the Human Interactive Driving division, a multidisciplinary research team developing a world foundation model for driving built from large-scale real-world and simulated data. The work focuses on advancing the state of the art in world modeling, including representation learning, action conditioning, and evaluation, with prototyping and evaluation in closed-loop simulations and contribution to research publications alongside TRI scientists.

Responsibilities

Conduct original research in one or more areas: world modeling, multi-agent interaction, reinforcement learning, perception, or sim-to-real transfer; Collaborate closely with full-time researchers on the design, training, and evaluation of learning-based driving systems; 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 pursuing a Ph.D. in Computer Science, Robotics, Machine Learning, Electrical Engineering, or related fields; Strong background in machine learning, particularly deep learning, generative models, reinforcement learning, or probabilistic modeling; Hands-on experience training and evaluating world models, model-based reinforcement learning, 3D reconstruction or sensor fusion, and large-scale simulation for robotics or autonomous systems; Proficient coding skills with expertise in modern deep learning frameworks (e.g., PyTorch, JAX, TensorFlow, etc.); Prior publication(s) in top-tier AI/ML conferences

Nice to have

Probabilistic and generative modeling; Autonomous driving datasets; Open-source foundation models; Amazon Web Services (e.g., S3, EC2, SageMaker, etc.); Links to relevant open-source contributions or technical project write-ups

Benefits

Paid internship; Medical, dental, and vision insurance; Paid time off benefits (including holiday pay and sick time)