Postdoctoral Researcher, Foundation Models For Driving

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. To lead this transformative shift in mobility, we've built a world-class team in Robotics, Human-Centered AI, Human Interactive Driving, and Energy & Materials.

We are looking for a data-driven robotics researcher with a strong background in embodied machine learning and a "make it happen" mentality who is interested in spending a year collaborating with our research team as a visiting scholar to drive the state-of-the-art in prediction and behavior learning for automated driving. The ideal candidate is able to operate independently when needed but works well as part of a larger integrated group at the cutting edge of state-of-the-art robotics and machine learning. Experience with robots or other embodied systems (such as autonomous vehicles) is strongly preferred.

An ideal candidate has a proven track record of leading independent research efforts, preferably including mentoring and collaborating with less experienced students and researchers. A current postdoc looking to take an additional year of research before beginning a faculty position would be a great fit for this role, as would a more experienced existing faculty member looking to take a year-long sabbatical with us. This position requires a hands-on researcher interested in formulating research ideas and implementing and evaluating them in collaboration with our team. We expect this position to result in peer-reviewed publications, including the potential for ongoing long-term collaboration with TRI.

Responsibilities

• Conduct ambitious research to advance the state-of-the-art in using new capabilities in generative AI (e.g., recent results in diffusion policy [1],[2]) for end-to-end perception, planning and prediction in automated driving with a focus on computer vision as the primary sensing modality

• Push the boundaries of knowledge and implement, extend, and create innovative methods for prediction and behavior learning from human-driving data

• Work with high-performance machine-learning pipelines and deploy onboard for closed-loop evaluation with scalability, efficiency, and performance in mind

• Collaborate with a multidisciplinary team including other researcher scientists and engineers across TRI, Woven by Toyota, and university partners

• Take the lead on writing and publishing research results in peer-reviewed venues

Qualifications

• A PhD in a robotics-relevant / embodied-AI field such as Computer Science, Mathematics, Physics or Engineering

• Consistent track record of publishing at high-impact conferences/journals (CVPR, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML, CoRL, RSS, ICRA, ICCV, ECCV, PAMI, IJCV, etc.)

• A strong background of independent research

• Ability to independently formulate and implement a research agenda while collaborating with partners across a spectrum of subject areas

• Experience training large-scale foundation models (VLMs, text-to-video models, etc)

• Sufficient software engineering proficiency to implement and evaluate research ideas. We generally work in C++ and Python internally, and experience with either of those languages is a strong bonus.

Please add a link to Google Scholar and include a full list of publications when submitting your CV to this position.

The pay range for this position at commencement of employment is expected to be between $165,760 and $207,200/year for California-based roles; however, base pay offered may vary depending on multiple individualized factors, including market location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. Note that TRI offers a generous benefits package (including 401(k) eligibility and various paid time off benefits, such as vacation, sick time, and parental leave) and an annual cash bonus structure. Details of participation in these benefit plans will be provided if an employee receives an offer of employment.

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