About the role#
XPENG is hiring a PhD research intern to join the AI team. You will work on predictive world models that learn physical dynamics from large-scale data. Your work will involve predicting how scenes evolve based on agent actions and creating learned simulators for training driving and robotic policies. You will have access to data from our autonomous fleet and robotics platforms to build and test generative architectures.
What you'll do#
- Drive a research project from problem formulation to empirical analysis, working alongside a mentor and the research team.
- Develop architectures where a shared backbone predicts the future and produces trajectories or actions.
- Contribute to predictive pre-training to improve Vision-Language-Action (VLA) driving performance.
- Extend predictions beyond 2D pixels into a shared multimodal latent space that spans 3D scene representations.
- Investigate cross-embodiment generalization through unified observation and action representations.
- Build evaluation methods for predictive models, focusing on accuracy, generation fidelity, and long-horizon consistency.
- Collaborate with research engineers to move prototypes into scalable training pipelines.
- Publish and open-source your research results.
What you'll need#
- Currently pursuing a PhD in Engineering, Computer Science, or a related field with a focus on Deep Learning, Computer Vision, or Generative Models.
- First-author publications at top-tier venues like CVPR, ICCV, NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, CoRL, RSS, or SIGGRAPH.
- Hands-on experience building, training, and evaluating models in PyTorch or JAX.
- Strong Python programming skills and a solid understanding of data structures, algorithms, and code optimization.
- Experience with generative models for video or 3D, such as diffusion, flow matching, or neural scene representations.
- Experience with world models, model-based reinforcement learning, or VLA models.
- Experience with multimodal foundation models, video tokenizers, or VAEs.
- Prior research internship experience in autonomous driving, robotics, or embodied AI.
Location & details#
- Location: Santa Clara, California.
- Modality: On-site.
- Commitment: Minimum of 12 weeks.
- Status: Full-time, paid internship.
About XPENG
XPENG is a Chinese manufacturer of electric vehicles founded in 2014. The company focuses on the development of smart vehicle technology, including driver-assistance systems and in-car operating software. It maintains headquarters in Guangzhou and operates additional offices in Beijing and Palo Alto. The company produces vehicles at manufacturing plants located in Guangdong province.
How to get in at XPENG
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