Research Scientist Intern, Robotics Foundation Models Post-Training (PhD)

Meta Reality Labs Research is a team of researchers and engineers pushing the frontier of AI and robotics. Our team is building the next generation of world action models (WAMs) and vision-language-action models (VLAs) for robotic manipulation. We are seeking a Research Scientist Intern to develop scalable offline reinforcement learning methods for post-training these models. Interns in this role will conduct fundamental and applied research to advance foundation models for robotics, with a focus on post-training. You will collaborate with research scientists and engineers to develop new algorithms, build and evaluate model capabilities, and contribute to the next generation of embodied AI. Our internships are twelve (12) to twenty-four (24) weeks long and we have various start dates throughout the year.

Responsibilities

Develop scalable offline RL algorithms for post-training WAMs and VLAs using large, heterogeneous robot datasets.
• Investigate reward learning, value estimation, and policy optimization for generative action models, including approaches that use learned world models to support policy improvement.
• Address challenges in learning from mixed-quality experience, including distribution shift, sparse rewards, and long-horizon credit assignment.
• Build efficient training and data pipelines, and study how policy performance scales with dataset size, model capacity, and compute.
• Design experiments and benchmarks to evaluate policy improvement and generalization across tasks and environments.
• Collaborate with research scientists and engineers to evaluate learned policies in simulation and on real robots.
• Communicate research findings and publish results at leading machine learning and robotics venues.

Minimum Qualifications
• Currently has or is in the process of obtaining a Ph.D. Degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, or a related STEM field
• Research experience in reinforcement learning, including policy optimization, value learning, or offline/off-policy learning
• Experience implementing and training deep learning models using Python and PyTorch or a comparable framework
• Experience designing controlled experiments, analyzing results, and debugging machine learning algorithms
• Interpersonal experience: cross-group and cross-culture collaboration
• Must obtain work authorization in country of employment at the time of hire and maintain ongoing work authorization during employment

Preferred Qualifications
• Intent to return to degree program after the completion of the internship/co-op
• Experience developing offline RL methods, particularly for continuous control, large datasets, or learning from suboptimal experience
• Experience training or post-training VLAs, WAMs, or other foundation models for embodied decision-making
• Experience with diffusion or flow-based policies, action-sequence prediction, model-based RL, or action-conditioned world models
• Hands-on experience with distributed training across multiple GPUs or nodes, including improving training throughput, memory efficiency, and stability
• Experience evaluating learned policies on physical robots or robotics simulation benchmarks
• Proven track record of achieving significant results as demonstrated by grants, fellowships, patents, and/or accepted papers in top conferences or journals such as NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CoRL, RSS, ICRA, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, ACL, etc

About Meta

Meta builds technologies that help people connect, find communities, and grow businesses. When Facebook launched in 2004, it changed the way people connect. Apps like Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp further empowered billions around the world. Now, Meta is moving beyond 2D screens toward immersive experiences like augmented and virtual reality to help build the next evolution in social technology. People who choose to build their careers by building with us at Meta help shape a future that will take us beyond what digital connection makes possible today-beyond the constraints of screens, the limits of distance, and even the rules of physics.

Equal Employment Opportunity

Meta is proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity employer. We do not discriminate based upon race, religion, color, national origin, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, reproductive health decisions, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, genetic information, political views or activity, or other applicable legally protected characteristics. You may view our Equal Employment Opportunity notice here.