Research Scientist Intern, VLM and Omni Model Post-Training (PhD)

Summary:

The Meta Reality Labs Research Team brings together researchers, developers, and engineers to create the future of AR, VR, and contextual AI. The Surreal Vision group at Reality Labs Research is seeking outstanding Research Scientist Interns to advance posttraining of vision-language and omni models. As an intern, you will develop reinforcement learning (RL) methods that improve multimodal reasoning, temporal understanding, and grounded decision-making. Applications include procedural and real-time task assistants for future contextual AI devices.Your research project may cover or relate to the following topics:- Developing RL posttraining algorithms for VLMs and omni models, including on-policy optimization and learning from expert feedback.- Designing reward models and verifiable rewards for multimodal reasoning, temporal grounding, and calibrated decisions.- Combining supervised fine-tuning, preference learning, and RL to improve data efficiency, training stability, and generalization.- Posttraining with streaming video, speech, and environmental audio to improve reasoning. - Building evaluations and ablations that measure grounded model improvements and identify reward hacking and failures under ambiguous evidence.Our internships are twelve (12) to twenty-four (24) weeks long and we have flexible start dates.

Required Skills:

Research Scientist Intern, VLM and Omni Model Post-Training (PhD) Responsibilities:

1. Plan and execute innovative research to advance the state of the art in multimodal posttraining and reinforcement learning.

2. Collaborate with researchers to develop training pipelines, reward functions, experiments, and prototype systems.

3. Benchmark RL methods against supervised fine-tuning and preference-optimization baselines, and analyze model behavior and generalization.

4. Publish research findings at leading conferences and present research outcomes to internal and external audiences.

Minimum Qualifications:

Minimum Qualifications:

1. Currently has, or is in the process of obtaining, a PhD in machine learning, computer vision, natural language processing, speech and audio processing, reinforcement learning, or a related field

2. Proven research contributions demonstrated by grants, fellowships, patents, or publications at leading workshops or conferences such as NeurIPS, ICML, CVPR, ICLR, ICCV, ECCV, ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, ICASSP, and Interspeech

3. Knowledge of deep learning and multimodal foundation models, with hands-on experience in VLM or omni model posttraining, particularly reinforcement learning

4. Experience implementing deep learning algorithms, training models, and designing benchmarks and evaluations

5. Programming experience in Python and deep learning frameworks such as PyTorch

6. Experience working and communicating across functions in a team environment

7. Must obtain work authorization in the country of employment at the time of hire, and maintain ongoing work authorization during employment

Preferred Qualifications:

Preferred Qualifications:

1. Experience with RL posttraining methods, reward modeling, and/or preference optimization

2. Experience with distributed training, rollout generation, and scalable evaluation of multimodal foundation models

3. Research experience in video understanding, temporal reasoning, and/or audio-visual learning

4. Demonstrated research experience through internships, work experience, open source contributions, and/or publications

5. Intent to return to a degree program after completion of the internship

Public Compensation:

$7,650/month to $12,667/month + benefits

Industry: Internet

Equal Opportunity:

Meta is proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity and Affirmative Action employer. We do not discriminate based upon race, religion, color, national origin, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, transgender status, sexual stereotypes, age, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, or other applicable legally protected characteristics. We also consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable federal, state and local law. Meta participates in the E-Verify program in certain locations, as required by law. Please note that Meta may leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies in connection with applications for employment.

Meta is committed to providing reasonable accommodations for candidates with disabilities in our recruiting process. If you need any assistance or accommodations due to a disability, please let us know at [email protected].