Intern Research Scientist (Vision-Language-Action Models)

About the role

The AI Robot Association (AIRoA) is running a national project to collect one million hours of humanoid robot operation data and use it to train powerful Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models. It is recruiting an intern research scientist to work on the core research of the project, which launches officially on 1 October 2025. The work is based at the Tokyo Ryutsu Center in Ota-ku, Tokyo.

Key responsibilities

• Design and implement data preprocessing pipelines for multimodal robot datasets
• Train VLA models using supervised learning, RL, fine-tuning, RLHF and training from scratch
• Develop and evaluate models in simulation and on physical robots
• Improve training robustness and efficiency through algorithmic innovation
• Analyze model performance and propose improvements based on empirical results
• Deploy VLA models onto real humanoid and mobile robotic platforms
• Publish research in top-tier conferences such as NeurIPS, CoRL, CVPR

Required profile

• MS or PhD in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering or a related field
• Publications at leading ML, robotics and computer vision conferences (e.g. NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ICRA, IROS, RSS, CoRL, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV)
• Experience with open-ended learning, reinforcement learning and frontier methods for training LLMs/VLMs/VLAs such as RLHF and reward function design
• Experience with simulators or real-world robots

Required skills

• Deep learning frameworks such as PyTorch
• Preferred: robot learning, impedance/adaptive/force control or MPC, tactile sensing, ROS, and simulators such as MuJoCo, PyBullet or Isaac Sim