Research Intern, Continual Adaptation for Robotics

We are seeking a research intern to advance continual adaptation for robot policies. Our goal is to enable robots to improve from experience, personalize their behavior, preserve learned capabilities, and build on prior learning to acquire new behaviors more efficiently.

You will work closely with our robotics and machine learning researchers on a project shaped around your interests, expertise, and the team’s priorities. The work will combine algorithm development with experiments in simulation and on real robots, emphasizing reliable adaptation with limited robot experience and human effort.

The Research

We are interested in how robots can improve through ongoing experience while preserving and building on what they have learned. Your project could explore one of the following directions:

• Continual learning: Preserve existing capabilities through successive adaptations and use prior experience to learn new behaviors more efficiently. Investigate how useful adaptations can be retained, combined, and reused, including settings where the original training data are unavailable.
• Efficient learning and adaptation: Enable robots to improve with limited experience by identifying where adaptation is needed and making effective use of prior knowledge, new interactions, and guidance.
• Personalization from human guidance: Use demonstrations, corrections, or preference feedback to change how a robot performs a task while maintaining task success. Investigate when guidance is sufficient and when further learning is needed.

Possible approaches include reinforcement learning, imitation learning, agentic tool use, modular policies, and distillation, depending on the research question.

• Work with your mentor to formulate a focused research question, develop an approach, and implement it within the team's research systems.
• Design and run controlled experiments with strong baselines in simulation and on real robots, using measures appropriate to the project, such as task success, retention and transfer of learned capabilities, adherence to user preferences, and the robot experience and human effort required.
• Analyze failure modes and maintain reproducible code and experimental records.
• Collaborate with researchers and engineers, present findings, and contribute to technical reports and potential publications in robotics and machine learning venues.

• Currently pursuing a Ph.D. in robotics, machine learning, computer science, or a related field.
• Research experience in reinforcement learning, imitation learning, continual learning, or closely related machine learning methods.
• Strong programming skills in Python and experience with a deep learning framework such as PyTorch or JAX.
• Ability to design experiments, reason critically about results, work independently with mentorship, and communicate clearly.

• Experience with generative robot policies, diffusion or flow models, vision-language-action, or world-action models.
• Experience with online reinforcement learning, interactive learning, personalization, preference learning, or continual learning.
• Experience with post-training, parameter-efficient adaptation, modular models, or agentic approaches using pretrained models.
• Experience with robotics simulation, real-world robot learning, or robot data collection and evaluation systems.
• Relevant research contributions demonstrated through publications, open-source projects, or substantial research projects.

The pay range for this position at commencement of employment is expected to be between $40 and $58/hour for Massachusetts-based roles. Base pay offered will depend on multiple individualized factors, including, but not limited to, a candidate's experience, skills, job-related knowledge, and market location. TRI offers a generous benefits package including medical, dental, and vision insurance, and paid time off benefits (including holiday pay and sick time). Additional details regarding these benefit plans will be provided if an employee receives an offer of employment.

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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!