Research Intern: Action Proficiency Understanding in Videos

Honda Research Institute USA; San Jose (CA); On-site; USD 34,000 - 44,000; Full time

Job summary

Honda Research Institute USA invites a Ph.D. research intern to advance human action understanding in long videos. You will explore skill assessment and proficiency estimation, contributing to publications and patents in collaboration with the team in San Jose, CA.

The role emphasizes independent research, literature reviews, and engineering with PyTorch, targeting top-tier CV/ML conferences and potential collaboration on real-world datasets.

Qualifications

• Currently enrolled in a Ph.D. program in Computer Vision, ML, AI, or related field.
• Publication record at top conferences is preferred.
• Experience with multimodal language models and video understanding is desirable.

Responsibilities

• Conduct research evaluating skill and proficiency in long videos.
• Evaluate baselines on existing benchmarks.
• Run experiments, analyze results, and contribute to papers.

Skills

PhD candidacy

Publication record

Deep learning

PyTorch

Communication

Education

Ph.D. in Computer Vision / ML / AI

Tools

PyTorch

Job description

Research Intern: Action Proficiency Understanding in Videos - Honda Research Institute USA

Research Intern: Action Proficiency Understanding in Videos

Job Number: P26INT-13

Honda Research Institute USA (HRI-US) is seeking a highly motivated and independent Ph.D. research intern to join our team in advancing research in human action understanding and computer vision for long videos. The project focuses on skill assessment and proficiency estimation in videos. This role is ideal for a researcher with a strong background in video understanding, human-object interaction, and vision-language models. The intern will work on real-world challenges involving long-horizon human activity videos and contribute to high-impact publications and patents.

San Jose, CA

Key Responsibilities

• Conduct cutting-edge research in evaluating skill and proficiency in videos.
• Evaluate state-of-the‑art baselines on existing benchmarks.
• Perform literature reviews, formulate hypotheses, run experiments, and analyze results.
• Lead or contribute to writing research papers, including potential submission to top‑tier computer vision or machine learning conferences (e.g., CVPR, ICCV, NeurIPS, ECCV).
• Write well‑structured, efficient code using deep learning frameworks such as PyTorch.

Minimum Qualifications

• Currently enrolled in a Ph.D. program in Computer Vision, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, or a closely related field.
• Publication record at top‑tier conferences (e.g., CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, WACV, NeurIPS, ICLR).
• Prior research experience with multimodal language models, spatiotemporal video encoders, and video action understanding.
• Previous experience with untrimmed procedural, sports or everyday‑like video datasets.
• Excellent programming skills, the ability to write reproducible research code, and proficiency in deep learning frameworks, especially PyTorch.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills.

Ability to independently drive research, from ideation to experimentation and publication.

Bonus Qualifications

• Familiarity with generative models such as diffusion models.
• Experience working with hand or body pose and human‑object interaction.
• Experience working on procedural error detection or understanding.

Years of Work Experience Required

0

Desired Start Date

May 2027

Internship Duration

3 Months

Position Keywords

Human Object Interaction, Proficiency Estimation, Vision Language Models, Learning from Narration