Research Associate Toyota Research Institute - 4.0 Los Altos, CA Job Details Part-time | Contract $65 - $70 an hour 2 hours ago Qualifications AI models Engineering stress testing Stress testing simulations Software engineering Academic research projects Robotic systems Conference papers Computer vision Tooling Publishing papers in peer-reviewed journals Generative models AI platforms (beyond public GPTs) Model deployment Computer vision research Implementation (software development lifecycle) Policy research projects Developing large-scale AI models Technical research projects Participating in conferences Model training Open source contribution Benchmarking Senior level Scalability and Performance Testing (system development) Communication skills Stress Testing Generative AI Providing code feedback Robot simulation Full Job Description HireArt 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, Any4Dv3, 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 Any4Dv3 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

Bonus Qualifications:

A track record of contributions to open-source projects or publications at top-tier venues such as

CVPR, ICLR, NeurIPS, RSS, or ICRA Commitment:

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