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

Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. ByteDance is a leading technology company dedicated to pioneering advanced AI foundation models. They are looking for a PhD Intern to contribute to the development of real-time multimodal LLM-based agents for streaming video tasks, focusing on research in streaming video understanding and reinforcement learning. Responsibilities 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 verifiable 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) Skills 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 continuous 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 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 Benefits Interns have day one access to health insurance Life insurance Wellbeing benefits and more Interns also receive 10 paid holidays per year 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. Company Overview ByteDance is a technology company that develops content creation platforms and services. It was founded in 2012, and is headquartered in Beijing, Beijing, CHN, with a workforce of 10001+ employees. Its website is Company H1B Sponsorship ByteDance has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships, with 1350 in 2025, 1123 in 2024, 775 in 2023, 487 in 2022, 417 in 2021, 245 in 2020. Please note that this does not guarantee sponsorship for this specific role.