Automated Driving Advanced Development Intern, Machine Learning Research at Toyota Research Institute

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 advancing the state of the art in AI, robotics, driving, and material sciences.

This is a paid 12-week internship opportunity and is a hybrid, in-office role.

Here’s a glimpse into the Internship experience from some of our TRI interns!

Responsibilities

• Define a focused research question and experimental plan with your mentor, informed by your interests and the team’s research priorities.
• Develop methods in one or more relevant areas, such as multimodal agents, generative policies, world models, simulation, or learning from interaction.
• Build research prototypes using open-source datasets, large-scale Toyota driving data, the team’s closed-loop simulation infrastructure
• Design experiments and evaluate generalization, robustness, efficiency, or closed-loop behavior, as relevant to the project.
• Collaborate with TRI researchers and engineers to analyze results, investigate failure modes, and refine the research approach.
• Communicate findings through reproducible experiments, research presentations, and technical writing, including publication contributions where appropriate.

Qualifications

• Currently pursuing a Ph.D. or master’s degree in Computer Science, Robotics, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Electrical Engineering, or a related field.
• Proficiency in Python and ML frameworks such as PyTorch for implementing and evaluating research ideas, along with an understanding of version control, testing, and software engineering fundamentals.
• Research experience in one or more of the following: computer vision, natural language processing, generative modeling, reinforcement learning
• Demonstrated research ability, such as publications, preprints, or substantial independent research projects.
• Ability to work independently on an open-ended research problem, and to communicate methods and results clearly.
• Able to work in a hybrid in-office arrangement at TRI’s headquarters in Los Altos, California, for the full 12-week internship.

Bonus Qualifications

• Experience with driving or robotics simulators such as CARLA or with neural rendering.
• Experience with language or vision-language models, agent systems, or multimodal reasoning.
• Experience with diffusion or flow models, generative policies, video generation, or world models.
• Experience working with real-world sensor data, such as video, lidar, IMU, or radar.
• Experience with autonomous driving, robotics, simulation, or closed-loop learning and evaluation.
• Publications at venues such as NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, CoRL, ICRA, RSS