Research Scientist Intern, 3d Vision & World Simulation (phd)

Meta Meta · Big Tech · Redmond, WA

Research Scientist Intern focused on AI-driven 3D spatial understanding and generative modeling for next-generation assistance systems. The role involves developing and evaluating methods for VLMs and related AI/ML models, with a focus on generative AI (diffusion models), world simulation, and 3D computer vision. The work is expected to result in publishable research.

What you'd actually do

  1. Develop, implement, and evaluate methods for improving the performance and interpretability of VLMs and related AI/ML models.
  2. Write modular, reusable research code and utilize Meta’s large infrastructure to scale experimentation.
  3. Collaborate cross-functionally with researchers and engineers to prototype and test models at scale.
  4. Deliver clear, compelling, and creative solutions to challenging problems.
  5. Work should result in publishable research in top-tier journals or conferences (e.g., NeurIPS, ICLR, CVPR, ECCV, ICML, ICCV, AAAI, IJCAI, ICRA, IEEE T-PAMI, IJCV, IEEE RA-L etc.).
  6. Design and develop generative AI models (e.g., diffusion models) to learn environment dynamics, predict future states, and simulate physical interactions within world modeling frameworks.
  7. Build and advance 3D computer vision and reconstruction pipelines, leveraging camera geometry, depth estimation, and related techniques to create accurate representations of real-world environments.
  8. Research and implement methods for 3D spatial understanding, including motion forecasting and trajectory prediction, to enable intelligent reasoning about how objects and agents move through space.

Skills

Required

  • PhD in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, or related field
  • Strong programming proficiency in Python
  • extensive hands-on experience building, training, and debugging deep learning models using PyTorch
  • Experience with generative AI architectures (e.g., diffusion models) and world modeling concepts
  • Solid foundation in 3D computer vision and 3D reconstruction
  • Experience working with 3D spatial data, motion forecasting, or trajectory prediction
  • Practical experience with advanced generative frameworks, specifically flow-matching or Diffusion Transformers (DiTs)
  • Hands-on experience with modern 3D representations like 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) and forecasting dense 3D point trajectories in physical world coordinates
  • Background in robotics planning and manipulation
  • Familiarity with large Vision-Language Models (VLMs)
  • Knowledge of extending world models to physical applications
  • A proven track record of academic research, demonstrated by publications in top-tier conferences (e.g., CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICRA, RSS) in areas related to 3D vision, generative modeling, or robot learning
  • Demonstrated software engineer experience via an internship, work experience, coding competitions, or widely used contributions in open source repositories (e.g. GitHub)

Nice to have

  • experience transferring learned representations to downstream tasks like closed-loop pick-and-place or real-world robot control
  • object grounding
  • understanding natural language instructions
  • processing multi-modal tokens
  • latent-action world models
  • trajectory-conditioned video generation

What the JD emphasized

  • PhD in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, or related field
  • publications in top-tier conferences (e.g., CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICRA, RSS) in areas related to 3D vision, generative modeling, or robot learning

Other signals

  • develop next generation of assistance systems
  • AI-driven 3D spatial understanding
  • generative modeling
  • deep learning systems
  • generative AI (e.g., diffusion models)
  • world simulation
  • 3D computer vision