Student Researcher [Seed Multimodality & World Model – RL + Streaming Video Understanding] – 2026 Start (PhD)

Responsibilities

About the team The Seed Multimodal Interaction and World Model team is dedicated to developing models that boast human-level multimodal understanding and interaction capabilities. The team also aspires to advance the exploration and development of multimodal assistant products. We are looking for talented individuals to join us for an internship in 2026. PhD Internships at ByteDance aim to provide students with the opportunity to actively contribute to our products and research, and to the organization's future plans and emerging technologies. PhD internships at ByteDance provide students with the opportunity to actively contribute to our products and research, and to the organization's future plans and emerging technologies. Our dynamic internship experience blends hands-on learning, enriching community-building and development events, and collaboration with industry experts. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis - we encourage you to apply early. Please state your availability clearly in your resume (Start date, End date).

Responsibilities This role focuses on building real-time multimodal LLM-based agents for streaming video tasks, tackling unique challenges in designing novel model architectures, scalable data pipelines, and reinforcement learning algorithms in streaming interactions. - Conduct research on streaming video understanding, especially for first-person or long-horizon applications, where the agent must continuously observe, interpret, and act. - Apply reinforcement learning to improve real-time perception and planning capabilities of streaming agents, including learning from human feedback, demonstrations, and/or verfiable rewards. - Build or enhance scalable data pipelines that convert offline video datasets into streaming-compatible formats, enabling the development of new agent capabilities. - Design and evaluate video agents that integrate LLMs/VLMs with decision-making components for downstream applications (e.g., tool use, retrieval, resolution switching).

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications: - Currently pursuing a PhD in Computer Vision, Machine Learning, or a related field. - Research experience in video generation, world models, or dynamics modeling. - First-author publications in CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, NeurIPS, ICLR, or ICML. - Research experience in one or more of the following areas: - Streaming video understanding, online video processing, or sequential decision making from continous visual inputs. - Reinforcement learning (RL), especially when combined with LLMs or multimodal models (e.g., decision-making with VLMs, generative agents, action-planning). - Data engineering, such as synthetic data generation, prompt engineering, scalable data pipeline curation. Preferred Qualifications: - Strong software engineering skills and ability to work in existing infrastructure (e.g., PyTorch, distributed training frameworks). - Familiarity with streaming video processing in multimodal LLMs. - Experience working with RL for LLMs or multimodal LLMs. - Experience working with large-scale data pipelines, including multimodal dataset processing and task-specific synthetic data generation.

Job Information

Benefits may vary depending on the nature of employment and the country work location. Interns have day one access to health insurance, life insurance, wellbeing benefits and more. Interns also receive 10 paid holidays per year and paid sick time (56 hours if hired in first half of year, 40 if hired in second half of year). Interns who are not working 100% remote may also be eligible for housing allowance.

The Company reserves the right to modify or change these benefits programs at any time, with or without notice.

For Los Angeles County (unincorporated) Candidates:

Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with all federal, state, and local laws including the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers and the California Fair Chance Act. Our company believes that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship on the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of the conditional offer of employment:

1. Interacting and occasionally having unsupervised contact with internal/external clients and/or colleagues;

2. Appropriately handling and managing confidential information including proprietary and trade secret information and access to information technology systems; and

3. Exercising sound judgment.

About Doubao (Seed)

Founded in 2023, the Doubao (Seed) Team, is dedicated to pioneering advanced AI foundation models. Our goal is to lead in cutting-edge research and drive technological and societal advancements.

With a strong commitment to AI, our research areas span deep learning, reinforcement learning, Language, Vision, Audio, AI Infra and AI Safety. Our team has labs and research positions across China, Singapore, and the US.

Why Join ByteDance

Inspiring creativity is at the core of ByteDance's mission. Our innovative products are built to help people authentically express themselves, discover and connect – and our global, diverse teams make that possible. Together, we create value for our communities, inspire creativity and enrich life - a mission we work towards every day.

As ByteDancers, we strive to do great things with great people. We lead with curiosity, humility, and a desire to make impact in a rapidly growing tech company. By constantly iterating and fostering an "Always Day 1" mindset, we achieve meaningful breakthroughs for ourselves, our Company, and our users. When we create and grow together, the possibilities are limitless. Join us.

Diversity & Inclusion

ByteDance is committed to creating an inclusive space where employees are valued for their skills, experiences, and unique perspectives. Our platform connects people from across the globe and so does our workplace. At ByteDance, our mission is to inspire creativity and enrich life. To achieve that goal, we are committed to celebrating our diverse voices and to creating an environment that reflects the many communities we reach. We are passionate about this and hope you are too.

Reasonable Accommodation

ByteDance is committed to providing reasonable accommodations in our recruitment processes for candidates with disabilities, pregnancy, sincerely held religious beliefs or other reasons protected by applicable laws. If you need assistance or a reasonable accommodation, please reach out to us at https://tinyurl.com/RA-request