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Toyota Research Institute · 3 weeks ago

Research Scientist, World Models – Policy Training and Evaluation

Los Altos, CA

Full-time

Hybrid

Senior Level

$176K/yr - $264K/yr

Toyota Research Institute (TRI) is dedicated to improving the quality of human life through innovative research in various domains including Human-Centered AI and Robotics. They are seeking a Research Scientist focused on developing world models for policy learning and evaluation in autonomous vehicles, ensuring these models support robust decision-making and safety-critical applications.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)AutomotiveConsumer ResearchMachine LearningProduct Research

Comp. & Benefits

H1B Sponsor Likely

Responsibilities

Develop and refine world models that support realistic and diverse counterfactual reasoning, scenario generation, and policy rollout

Ensure that world models are compatible with and useful for reinforcement learning, imitation learning, and offline policy evaluation techniques

Design methods to synthesize high-risk or edge-case scenarios from world models, enabling robust stress-testing of autonomous policies

Explore techniques such as latent-space simulation, world model distillation, differentiable simulation, and closed-loop evaluation to improve policy development and evaluation pipelines

Partner with researchers in world modeling, planning, and safety evaluation to co-develop aligned architectures and learning objectives to ensure that learned models accurately capture agent-environment dynamics relevant to long-horizon planning and safety-critical decision-making

Publish high-quality research and contribute to the community through open-source tools, benchmarks, and conference participation

Qualification

Model-based reinforcement learningWorld modelsImitation learningPythonML frameworksLatent dynamics modelsHigh-quality publicationsUncertainty modelingGeneralizationRobustness

Required

PhD in Computer Science, Robotics, Machine Learning, or a related field

Strong background in at least two of the following areas: World models or model-based reasoning in dynamic environments, World model adaptation and fine-tuning, Offline RL or imitation learning, Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL), Simulation-to-reality transfer, or Policy evaluation and safety assurance

A track record of high-quality publications in ML or robotics venues (e.g., ICML, ICLR, NeurIPS, CoRL, RSS)

Familiarity with latent dynamics models (e.g., Dreamer, PlaNet, MuZero)

Understanding of uncertainty modeling, generalization, and robustness in learned environments

Experience evaluating autonomous vehicle policies in simulation and real-world settings

Experience in building or applying models for downstream evaluation of autonomous systems

Proficiency in Python and ML frameworks (e.g., PyTorch, JAX)

Benefits

Medical, dental, and vision insurance

401(k) eligibility

Paid time off benefits (including vacation, sick time, and parental leave)

Annual cash bonus structure

Company

Toyota Research Institute

Glassdoor4.2

Toyota Research Institute is an R&D enterprise with an initial focus on artificial intelligence and robotics.

Founded in 2016

Palo Alto, California, USA

201-500 employees

http://www.tri.global

H1B Sponsorship

Toyota Research Institute 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 (10)

2020 (7)