Human Interactive Driving Intern – World Models

Team: Internships - Fall 2026

Location: Los Altos, CA

Commitment: Intern

Workplace Type: hybrid

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

• Conduct original research in one or more areas: world modeling, multi-agent interaction, reinforcement learning, perception, or simulation-to-reality transfer.
• Collaborate closely with full-time researchers on the design, training, and evaluation of learning-based driving systems.
• Contribute to building and experimenting with task-aware, multi-modal, and uncertainty-aware models.
• Develop and evaluate prototypes in closed-loop simulation environments and, time permitting, on high-performance autonomous driving hardware.
• Present research findings through internal talks and work towards a top-tier academic publication.
• Integrate and work with large-scale datasets (open-source and internal).

Qualifications

• Currently enrolled in a Ph.D. program in Computer Science, Robotics, Machine Learning, or a related field.
• Strong background in machine learning, particularly in areas such as deep learning, generative models, reinforcement learning, or probabilistic modeling.
• Demonstrated experience with one or more of the following: World models (e.g., latent dynamics, diffusion-based models), Model-based RL or decision-making, 3D perception or sensor fusion, and Large-scale simulation for robotics or autonomous systems.
• Prior publication(s) in top-tier conferences (NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, CVPR, ICRA, CoRL, etc.)
• Proficiency with Python and PyTorch.
• Familiarity with AWS services (S3, EC2, and SageMaker) and open-source driving datasets (nuScenes, Waymo, Argoverse, etc.) is a plus.