Machine Learning Researcher

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.

The Team   The Automated Driving Advance Development division at TRI focuses on enabling innovation and transformation at Toyota by building a bridge between TRI research and Toyota products, services, and needs. We achieve this through partnership, collaboration, and shared commitment. The Automated Driving Advance Development team is leading a new cross-organizational project between TRI and Woven by Toyota to research and develop a fully end-to-end learned automated driving / ADAS stack. This cross-org collaborative project is synergistic with TRI’s robotics divisions' efforts in Diffusion Policy and Large Behavior Models (LBM).   The Opportunity   We are looking for a Senior Machine Learning Researcher to join us in developing a state-of-the-art, pixels-to-action, end-to-end system for automated driving. As an expert in machine learning, you will contribute to designing and developing innovative models for our autonomy stack and deploying them on vehicle platforms to solve daily driving tasks and handle long-tail scenarios.   An ideal candidate has a strong track record of leading independent research efforts, preferably including mentoring and collaborating with less experienced students and researchers. You will help to drive our exploration into end-to-end learning approaches for automated driving, using large-scale sensor data directly for perception, planning, and prediction to overcome traditional "information bottlenecks." This includes expanding our successful Large Behavior Model (LBM) robotics efforts and Diffusion Policy (DP) research into the driving domain, designing scalable architectures, and integrating visual-language-action modalities. Beyond refining models for closed-loop driving on public roads and in simulation, you will also explore data quality filtering, transfer learning from diverse data sources, and edge deployment optimization. This work is part of Toyota’s global AI efforts to build a more coordinated global approach across Toyota entities.

Responsibilities

• Conduct ambitious research to advance the state-of-the-art in using new capabilities in generative AI (e.g., recent results in diffusion policy [1],[2]) for end-to-end perception, planning, and prediction in automated driving with a focus on computer vision as the primary sensing modality.
• Research and implement scalable end-to-end architectures that process raw sensor data to generate vehicle trajectories, addressing the challenges of long-tail driving scenarios with low data coverage.