Research Scientist: Human-Centric Visual Intelligence ...

Honda Research Institute USA, Inc.; San Jose (CA); On-site; USD 100,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

Honda Research Institute USA, Inc. is seeking a Research Scientist in San Jose, CA. This role aims to advance human-centric visual intelligence through AI systems that perceive and interpret human actions.

The ideal candidate will have a Ph.D. in a relevant field and a strong publication record. Responsibilities include conducting original research, collaborating with interdisciplinary teams, and publishing findings at leading conferences.

The position offers the opportunity to work at the forefront of multimodal AI research.

Qualifications

• Strong publication record at leading AI, machine learning, or computer vision conferences.
• Research experience in video understanding and temporal modeling.
• 1 - 3 years of relevant work experience.

Responsibilities

• Conduct original research on human activities and behaviors.
• Investigate multimodal representation learning and temporal reasoning.
• Collaborate with teams to translate research into impactful AI systems.

Skills

Generative models and latent-variable learning

Machine learning and deep learning

Multimodal representation learning

Video understanding and activity recognition

Excellent communication skills

Education

Ph.D. in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Cognitive Science, or related field

Job description

Job Number: P25F12

Honda Research Institute USA (HRI-US) is seeking a Research Scientist to advance the state of the art in human-centric visual intelligence. This role focuses on developing AI systems that perceive, interpret, and reason about human activities, interactions, intentions, and experiences across vision, language, and action. The successful candidate will conduct fundamental research in multimodal learning and human understanding, developing novel algorithms and models that enable AI systems to better understand people and their behavior in complex real-world environments.

San Jose, CA

Key Responsibilities

• Conduct original research, develop novel methods and advance state of the art to enable AI systems to perceive, understand, and reason about human activities, behaviors, interactions, and intentions.
• Investigate multimodal representation learning, alignment, temporal reasoning, and long-horizon understanding of human activities and experiences.
• Develop methods for modeling latent human states, such as intent, goals, beliefs, attention, and other unobservable factors that influence behavior.
• Design and execute rigorous experiments, benchmarking studies, and ablation analyses to validate research hypotheses.
• Contribute to design, collection and annotation of new impactful video datasets.
• Collaborate with interdisciplinary teams of scientists and engineers to translate research advances into impactful AI systems.
• Publish research findings at leading AI, machine learning, and computer vision conferences and journals.
• Contribute to research strategy and intellectual property development.

Minimum Qualifications

• Ph.D. in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Cognitive Science, Computational Neuroscience, or a related field.
• Strong publication record at leading AI, machine learning, or computer vision venues such as CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, NeurIPS, ICLR, AAAI, or equivalent.
• Expertise in generative models and latent-variable learning, including Variational Autoencoders (VAEs), Diffusion Models, Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), or related approaches.
• Strong foundation in machine learning, deep learning, and modern AI methodologies.
• Research experience in video understanding, activity recognition, and temporal modeling.
• Expertise in multimodal representation learning and alignment, vision and text encoders, and large-scale video datasets.
• Excellent communication, presentation, and collaboration skills.
• 1 - 3 years of relevant work experience.

Bonus Qualifications

• Research expertise in long-range action understanding, including action segmentation, temporal alignment, action anticipation and other long-horizon activity modeling.
• Experience developing methods for inferring human activities, intentions, or future actions from incomplete, ambiguous, or partially observed data.
• Experience with human pose estimation, hand pose estimation, or their application to activity understanding.
• Research background of multimodal models, including Vision-Language Models (VLMs), Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), and related architectures.
• Understanding of multimodal training methodologies, architectures, adapters, objectives, and data curation strategies.
• Experience in modeling latent human states, intentions, goals, beliefs, attention, or other unobservable factors that influence behavior.
• Demonstrated ability to initiate and lead impactful research projects.

Desired Start Date: 7/6/2026

Position Keywords: human-centric visual intelligence, Multimodal AI, Video understanding