About the role#
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) is seeking a graduate intern to join the AI, Learning, and Intelligent Systems group. This role focuses on investigating methods for quantifying uncertainty in large language model (LLM) based science assistants during multi-turn scientific dialogues. The work centers on identifying when scientific tasks are underspecified or ill-posed, ensuring that AI assistants can flag these instances rather than making unsupported assumptions.
What you'll do#
- Research and evaluate uncertainty quantification and hallucination detection methods for agentic scientific workflows.
- Develop probing methods to predict when a scientific task specification is incomplete or inconsistent.
- Build and instrument evaluation pipelines to capture and analyze model internal states over multi-turn dialogues on high-performance computing (HPC) systems.
- Conduct experiments and analyze model behavior across various computational science domains.
- Contribute to technical documentation, research reports, publications, and project presentations.
What you'll need#
- A minimum 3.0 cumulative grade point average.
- Current enrollment in a graduate program (Master's or PhD) or completion of a degree within the last 12 months in Computer Science, Data Science, Mathematics, Statistics, Physics, or Engineering fields.
- Familiarity with LLMs, specifically agentic, tool-using, or multi-turn systems.
- Experience developing or evaluating machine learning models.
- Knowledge of probabilistic machine learning or uncertainty quantification concepts.
- Hands-on experience with open-weight LLMs and modern deep learning frameworks.
- Experience running Python code on HPC or multi-GPU environments.
Location & details#
- This is a full-time, paid internship.
- The work modality is remote.
- This position is subject to Department of Energy (DOE) access restrictions, requiring a favorable background investigation and the ability to obtain a federal Personal Identity Verification (PIV) card.
About National Renewable Energy Laboratory
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory operates as the primary national laboratory for the United States Department of Energy focused on energy systems research. Founded in 1977, the organization conducts research in energy efficiency, basic science, and energy security. It maintains a staff of approximately 3,751 employees. The laboratory is based in Golden, Colorado.
How to get in at National Renewable Energy Laboratory
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