Research Scientist Intern, 3D-grounded Generalist Model for Robotics (PhD)

The Meta Reality Labs Research Team brings together a world-class team of researchers, developers, and engineers to create the future of contextual AI and robotics.

The Surreal Vision group at RL Research is seeking exceptional Research Scientist interns to contribute to fundamental research on 3D-grounded generalist models for robotics. These models will form the foundation to enable accurate and efficient zero-shot general robotic manipulation in daily environments. As a research intern, you will tackle cutting-edge research challenges, innovate model architectures and training recipes, and deliver general robotics policies.

Your research project may cover or relate to the following topics:
- Generating and delivering effective data and training recipes to significantly improve the 3D/spatial understanding of large-scale foundation models.
- Developing generalist robotics policies based on large-scale 3D foundation models with interactive/real-time performance.
- Validating the developed robotics policies both in simulation and on real robots, with the stretch goal of delivering a live demonstration on physical hardware.

Our internships are twelve (12) to twenty-four (24) weeks long and we have various start dates throughout the year. Some projects may require a minimum of 24 consecutive weeks.

Responsibilities

Plan and execute cutting-edge research to advance the state-of-the-art in generalist robotics policies, as well as data pipelines and curation for large-scale 3D foundation models.
Collaborate with researchers and engineers across robotics teams at Meta to develop experiments, prototypes, and concepts that advance robotics policy training and evaluation.
Design, set up, and run practical experiments and prototype systems to validate and demonstrate generalist robotics policies based on large-scale 3D foundation models, both in simulation and on real robots.

Qualifications

Currently has, or is in the process of obtaining, a PhD in computer vision, robotics, machine learning, computer graphics, or a related field
Must obtain work authorization in the country of employment at the time of hire, and maintain ongoing work authorization during employment
Demonstrated knowledge of and hands-on experience with robotics policy training
Demonstrated knowledge of and hands-on experience with large-scale 3D data pipeline & curation for robotics or foundation model training
Hands-on experience implementing large foundation models and generative architectures (e.g., LLMs, VLMs, video diffusion models, world (action) models, VLAs, and reinforcement learning)
Experience with Python and deep learning frameworks such as PyTorch Ability to commit to 24 consecutive weeks of full-time internship work
Proven track record of achieving significant research results, demonstrated by grants, fellowships, patents, or first-authored publications (ideally with publicly available code) at premier conferences and workshops (e.g., CoRL/RSS/ICRA/IROS, CVPR/ECCV/ICCV, NeurIPS/ICLR/ICML, SIGGRAPH/SIGGRAPH Asia, etc)
Strong research background in robotics policy training, large foundation models (VLM/LLM), world (action) model, video diffusion models, neural 4D reconstruction & rendering
Strong programming experience using Python and PyTorch
Demonstrated software engineering experience via previous internships, work experience, coding competitions, or contributions to open-source repositories (e.g., GitHub)
Experience collaborating and communicating cross-functionally in a team environment
Intent to return to a degree program upon completion of the internship