ByteDance · 7 hours ago
Student Researcher [Seed Multimodality & World Model – RL + Streaming Video Understanding] – 2026 Start (PhD)
San Jose, CA
Internship
Onsite
Intern
$60/hr - $60/hr
Start in 2026ByteDance is a pioneering technology company focused on advanced AI foundation models. They are seeking a PhD intern to contribute to the development of real-time multimodal agents for streaming video tasks, focusing on challenges in model architecture and reinforcement learning algorithms.
ContentData MiningFoundational AIInternetSocial Media
Responsibilities
Conduct research on streaming video understanding, especially for first-person or long-horizon applications, where the agent must continuously observe, interpret, and act
Apply reinforcement learning to improve real-time perception and planning capabilities of streaming agents, including learning from human feedback, demonstrations, and/or verifiable rewards
Build or enhance scalable data pipelines that convert offline video datasets into streaming-compatible formats, enabling the development of new agent capabilities
Design and evaluate video agents that integrate LLMs/VLMs with decision-making components for downstream applications (e.g., tool use, retrieval, resolution switching)
Qualification
Required
Currently pursuing a PhD in Computer Vision, Machine Learning, or a related field
Research experience in video generation, world models, or dynamics modeling
First-author publications in CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, NeurIPS, ICLR, or ICML
Research experience in one or more of the following areas: Streaming video understanding, online video processing, or sequential decision making from continuous visual inputs
Reinforcement learning (RL), especially when combined with LLMs or multimodal models (e.g., decision-making with VLMs, generative agents, action-planning)
Data engineering, such as synthetic data generation, prompt engineering, scalable data pipeline curation
Preferred
Strong software engineering skills and ability to work in existing infrastructure (e.g., PyTorch, distributed training frameworks)
Familiarity with streaming video processing in multimodal LLMs
Experience working with RL for LLMs or multimodal LLMs
Experience working with large-scale data pipelines, including multimodal dataset processing and task-specific synthetic data generation
Benefits
Day one access to health insurance
Life insurance
Wellbeing benefits
10 paid holidays per year
Paid sick time (56 hours if hired in first half of year, 40 if hired in second half of year)
Housing allowance
Company
ByteDance
ByteDance is a technology company that develops content creation platforms and services.
Founded in 2012
10001+ employees
H1B Sponsorship
ByteDance has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships. Please note that this does not
guarantee sponsorship for this specific role. Below presents additional info for your
reference. (Data Powered by US Department of Labor)
Distribution of Different Job Fields Receiving Sponsorship
Represents job field similar to this job
Trends of Total Sponsorships
2025 (1350)
2024 (1123)
2023 (775)
2022 (487)
2021 (417)
2020 (245)
Funding
Current Stage
Late StageTotal Funding
$9.8BKey Investors
Capital TodayG42Tiger Global Management
2025-11-20Secondary Market· $300M
2024-07-25Secondary Market
2023-03-14Secondary Market· $100M
Leadership Team
Jochen Bischoff
Head of Global Business Solutions - Africa
Matty Lin
General Manager, Global Business Solutions, KR
Recent News
2026-01-21
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