Intern, Research Foundational Models

Location: Toronto, ON, CAN

Time Type: Full time

Job Description

Position Overview
We are seeking a research intern to explore fundamental challenges in geometry, design understanding, and relative spatial reasoning for vision-language models (VLMs). While modern VLMs have shown strong performance on captioning, semantic understanding, and segmentation, they continue to struggle with geometric reasoning, layout understanding, and precise relative positioning—capabilities that are critical for design, engineering, and creation workflows.
During this internship, you will work closely with research mentors to investigate new modeling and training paradigms that move beyond one-shot visual reasoning. The project will focus on approaches such as reinforcement learning, test-time computation, and “thinking with images,” where models iteratively attend to visual evidence, reason over intermediate representations, and verify hypotheses through visual feedback. The goal is to advance state-of-the-art methods for spatially grounded reasoning and contribute insights relevant to both the research community and Autodesk’s long-term vision for intelligent design tools.
Over the course of the internship, you will define and drive a focused research project, including model development, experimental validation, and analysis, with the opportunity to publish results and present findings internally and externally.

Responsibilities

• Define and execute a research project focused on geometric reasoning, spatial understanding, and layout awareness in vision-language models

• Conduct literature reviews to identify limitations of existing VLMs and relevant prior work in multimodal reasoning and reinforcement learning

• Design and implement novel training or inference strategies using reinforcement learning, test-time computation, or iterative visual reasoning

• Develop model architectures, training pipelines, and evaluation benchmarks for spatial and geometric tasks

• Run large-scale experiments, analyze results, and iterate on model designs based on empirical findings

• Compare proposed approaches against strong baselines and state-of-the-art methods

• Collaborate closely with research mentors and other researchers, sharing progress and incorporating feedback

• Author a research paper suitable for submission to a top-tier machine learning or computer vision conference

• Present research results internally at Autodesk and externally at academic venues

Minimum Qualifications

• Currently enrolled in a PhD program in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Computer Vision, or a closely related field

• Must have at least one academic remaining semester post internship

• Strong publication record in top-tier ML or vision conferences (e.g., ICML, NeurIPS, ICLR, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV)

• Hands-on experience training vision-language models and reinforcement learning algorithms

• Strong implementation skills using modern deep learning frameworks (e.g., PyTorch, TRL, Ray)

• Solid background in machine learning fundamentals and experimental research methodology

• Ability to work independently on open-ended research problems and communicate results clearly

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with multimodal or embodied reasoning, test-time optimization, or iterative inference methods

• Familiarity with geometric vision, spatial reasoning benchmarks, or synthetic visual datasets

• Experience scaling experiments on distributed systems or large compute clusters

• Strong written and verbal communication skills

About Autodesk

Welcome to Autodesk! Amazing things are created every day with our software – from the greenest buildings and cleanest cars to the smartest factories and biggest hit movies. We help innovators turn their ideas into reality, transforming not only how things are made, but what can be made.

We take great pride in our culture here at Autodesk – it’s at the core of everything we do. Our culture guides the way we work and treat each other, informs how we connect with customers and partners, and defines how we show up in the world.

When you’re an Autodesker, you can do meaningful work that helps build a better world designed and made for all. Ready to shape the world and your future? Join us!

Salary is one part of Autodesk’s competitive compensation package. Offers are based on the candidate’s experience, educational level, and geographic location.

Diversity & Belonging
We take pride in cultivating a culture of belonging where everyone can thrive. Learn more here: https://www.autodesk.com/company/diversity-and-belonging