Human-Interactive Driving Research Intern, Machine Learning

At Toyota Research Institute (TRI), we’re on a mission to improve the quality of human life. We’re developing new tools and capabilities to amplify the human experience. To lead this transformative shift in mobility, we’ve built a world-class team in Energy & Materials, Human-Centered AI, Human Interactive Driving (HID), Large Behavioral Models, and Robotics.
This is a summer 2025 paid 12-week internship opportunity with the HID, Human Machine Interaction Research (HMIR) team at TRI. Please note that this internship will be an in-office role based in Los Altos, CA, and includes multiple trips to test tracks.
The Team
The mission of the HMIR team is to advance human-AI interaction to help drivers unlock their full potential and improve their performance. One of the topics includes effective visual communication with AI through real-time video streams of the scene around the vehicle and their augmentations. This encompasses advancing real-time neural network-based image-to-image conversion, generative image processing, and exploring additional innovative approaches to enhance human-AI interaction.
The Internship
We are looking for a motivated intern to pursue new avenues of research consistent with the team's mission. This is an opportunity to apply your knowledge to novel research questions and work towards a publication with professional researchers. Applicants with relevant publications in the fields above and good collaboration skills are highly encouraged to apply.

Responsibilities

• Define project scope and agree on project direction with your mentorConduct research on efficient real-time inference of neural networks for advanced image-to-image conversion tasks (e.g., text-to-image generation, style transfer, super-resolution)
• Implement and optimize machine learning models, focusing on latency, quality, and computational efficiency
• Explore and evaluate techniques such as model quantization, pruning, and hardware acceleration (e.g., GPU/TPU optimizations).Collaborate with the team to integrate optimized models into real-time systems
• Analyze experimental results and contribute to technical documentation and potential publications

Qualifications

• Currently pursuing a Ph.D. student in related fields - ML/AI, computer science, or similar
• Publication background in relevant venues (e.g. NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR)Strong foundation in machine learning, deep learning, and neural network architectures
• Hands-on experience with deep learning frameworks such as PyTorchKnowledge of generative models and experience with image-to-image processing techniques
• Skills in C++ and/or Python in Linux environment and experience with software engineering tools/environments (git) and/or GPU programming (e.g. CUDA) are a plus

Please add a link to Google Scholar and include a full list of publications when submitting your CV to this position.
The pay range for this position at commencement of employment is expected to be between $45 and $65/hour for California-based roles; however, base pay offered may vary depending on multiple individualized factors, including market location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. Note that TRI offers a generous benefits package including vacation and sick time. Details of participation in these benefit plans will be provided if an employee receives an offer of employment.
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