Job Details:
Job Description:
Intel's Data Center Network Edge AI team builds the AI software stack that powers next-generation workloads across Intel® Xeon® processors, Intel® dGPU based on Intel Edge AI platforms. We deliver the algorithms, frameworks, and optimizations that bring large-scale multi-modal intelligence to Intel customers worldwide.
We are looking for an intern to contribute to our research and productization of Vision-Language Models (VLM) and Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models. You will work alongside senior software engineers to advance state-of-the-art multi-modal and embodied AI, while ensuring these models run efficiently on Intel hardware.
Responsibilities
- Conduct applied research on VLM / VLA architectures, pre-training, fine-tuning, and alignment techniques (SFT, RLHF, DPO, GRPO); reproduce and extend recent work such as OpenVLA, RT-2, π05, PaLI-Gemma, Qwen-VL, and InternVL.
- Design and implement multi-modal data pipelines for cleaning, synthesis, and augmentation of image-text-action datasets.
- Investigate efficient fusion strategies between vision encoders (ViT, SigLIP, DINOv2) and language backbones (LLaMA, Qwen, Mistral), including connector design and visual token compression.
- Explore VLA-specific components such as action heads (discrete tokenization, diffusion policy, flow matching), long-horizon planning, and closed-loop control.
- Apply model optimization techniques — quantization (INT8 / FP8 / INT4, AWQ, GPTQ, SmoothQuant), pruning, distillation, KV-cache optimization, and speculative decoding — to enable efficient deployment on Intel platforms.
- Collaborate with infrastructure engineers to deploy and benchmark optimized models across Intel® Xeon®, Intel® Gaudi®, Intel® Arc™ GPU, and Intel® Core™ Ultra (NPU) targets.
- Evaluate models against industry benchmarks (MMBench, MME, SEED-Bench, LIBERO, SimplerEnv) and contribute to internal evaluation suites.
- Publish results in technical reports and, where appropriate, top-tier venues (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, CoRL, RSS).
Qualifications:
Minimum Qualifications
The candidate must have the right to work in the country of employment without restriction.
- Currently pursuing an MS or PhD in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, Mathematics, or a related technical field.
- Available for a minimum of 3 months of full-time or near full-time engagement.
- Strong foundation in deep learning, including Transformers, diffusion models, and reinforcement learning.
- Proficiency in Python and PyTorch; familiarity with distributed training (DeepSpeed, FSDP, Megatron-LM).
- Demonstrated project or publication experience in at least one of the following: multi-modal large models, embodied AI/Lerobot learning, model compression and inference acceleration, or vision-language pre-training.
Preferred Qualifications
- Hands-on experience with model quantization, pruning, or distillation, and inference frameworks such as Pytorch, vLLM, SGLang, TensorRT-LLM, or llama.cpp.
- Prior deployment experience on Intel platforms (Xeon, Arc, Core Ultra).
- Experience with robotics simulation environments (Isaac Sim, MuJoCo, ManiSkill, RoboCasa) or real-robot systems.
- Open-source contributions to relevant AI projects on GitHub.
Job Type:
Student / Intern
Shift:
Shift 1 (China)
Primary Location:
PRC, Shanghai
Additional Locations:
PRC, Beijing, PRC, Shenzhen
Business group:
The Sales and Marketing Group (SMG) leverages the product portfolio to drive Intel's revenue growth and market expansion, blending strategic initiatives with dynamic sales efforts to capture and retain customers. SMG is responsible for empowering the sales force with tools and insights needed to close deals and build lasting customer relationships. Sales analytics and market research ensure strategies are both targeted and impactful. In SMG, disciplined execution, creativity, and ambition are celebrated, providing ample opportunities for career advancement and skill development.
Posting Statement:
All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, religious creed, sex, national origin, ancestry, age, physical or mental disability, medical condition, genetic information, military and veteran status, marital status, pregnancy, gender, gender expression, gender identity, sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by local law, regulation, or ordinance.
Position of Trust
N/A
Work Model for this Role
This role will require an on-site presence. * Job posting details (such as work model, location or time type) are subject to change.
- ADDITIONAL INFORMATION: Intel is committed to Responsible Business Alliance (RBA) compliance and ethical hiring practices. We do not charge any fees during our hiring process. Candidates should never be required to pay recruitment fees, medical examination fees, or any other charges as a condition of employment. If you are asked to pay any fees during our hiring process, please report this immediately to your recruiter.