EDB-IPP Project: Advancing Domain-Specific Multimodal Large Language Models and AI Governance f[...]

Rakuten Kobo Inc.; Singapore; On-site; SGD 36,000 - 48,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Full sponsorship for postgraduate PhD

Employment offer after PhD

Job summary

Rakuten Asia, in partnership with the EDB IPP, invites PhD candidates to work on deep learning, ML, and NLP research projects in Singapore. You will develop multimodal LLMs for e-commerce, travel marketplaces, customer service, and fintech, integrating domain knowledge for rapid deployment.

We seek researchers with strong ML/DL background, LLM experience, and publications. The program offers full sponsorship for postgraduate studies and a potential Rakuten Asia employment offer upon PhD

Qualifications

• Strong academic record in machine learning, deep learning, and multimodal AI.
• Expertise in CV, NLP, or audio processing domains relevant to multimodal models.
• Experience with large-language-model related projects and real-world deployment.

Responsibilities

• Develop and optimize domain-specific multimodal large language models for e-commerce, travel, customer service, and fintech.
• Integrate domain knowledge into multimodal models for rapid business deployment.
• Advance AI governance by building explainable content moderation and IP-protection systems.
• Optimize architectures for multilingual, multi-task, and multimodal performance with training acceleration.
• Collaborate with university partners and industry stakeholders to collect and annotate datasets.

Skills

Academic excellence in ML/DL

Multimodal AI expertise

LLM project experience

Publications or top conferences

PyTorch training/deployment

Education

PhD in ML/AI or related field

Tools

Mixed-precision training

Distributed training

Job description

Job Overview

Rakuten Asia, in partnership with the Economic Development Board (EDB) through the Industrial Postgraduate Programme (IPP), is seeking new PhD students to work on deep learning, machine learning, and natural language processing research projects.

Responsibilities

• Develop and optimize domain‑specific multimodal large language models (LLMs) tailored for e‑commerce, travel marketplaces, customer service, and fintech verticals.
• Integrate domain knowledge into multimodal models to enable rapid business deployment.
• Advance AI governance by building intelligent, explainable review systems for content moderation and intellectual property protection.
• Optimize model architectures for multilingual, multi‑task, and multimodal performance, applying training acceleration methods such as mixed‑precision and distributed training.
• Collaborate with university partners and industry stakeholders to collect, curate, and annotate domain‑specific datasets.

Qualifications

• Strong academic record in machine learning, deep learning, and multimodal AI.
• Expertise in one of the following areas: computer vision (image search, classification, segmentation, detection, OCR, graph neural networks, etc.); natural language processing (pre‑training, NLU, multilingual and cross‑lingual learning, NLG, semi‑supervised learning, etc.); audio signal processing (speech recognition, speaker identification, audio event detection, feature extraction).
• Experience in large‑language‑model related projects and applying them to real‑world problems.
• Published or competition‑qualified work in top‑tier conferences (e.g., ACL, EMNLP, ICML, CVPR, ICCV, AAAI, ICASSP).
• Hands‑on expertise and engineering skills: experience training and deploying PyTorch models, knowledge of mixed‑precision training and distributed training.

Benefits

• Full sponsorship for postgraduate studies under the IPP programme.
• Employment offer from Rakuten Asia upon successful completion of the PhD.

Equal Opportunity

Rakuten is an equal‑opportunity employer and welcomes applications regardless of sex, marital status, ethnic origin, sexual orientation, religious belief or age.