Research Scientist Energy Based Models
Astera Institute is an active nonprofit research institute and foundation that operates in-house neuroscience-informed AI research and funds, operates, and supports open-science programs and public goods.
About Astera Institute
Astera operates three divisions: Neuro-AI, Radial life-sciences research, and its Foundation. Its AI work pursues neuroscience-informed approaches to artificial general intelligence, while its foundation and Radial activities support open scientific infrastructure, datasets, research programs, and residencies.
Skills
Candidate Availability
Required and preferred rules are kept separate and reflect the wording in the original posting.
About the Role
You will develop and implement architectures and learning and inference algorithms for neuroscience-inspired energy-based world models. You will design experiments on cognition, causal representations, sensory-motor integration, active inference, and unsupervised learning. You will help translate mathematical frameworks into scalable systems and contribute to open science.
Requirements
- Strong foundations in deep learning, graphical models, and information theory
- Expert-level proficiency with PyTorch or JAX
- Clean, reproducible research coding skills
- Demonstrated interest in AI robustness, generalization, and common-sense reasoning
- Passion for computational and architectural principles of the mammalian brain
- Ability to thrive in a lean, fast-paced environment with high autonomy
Responsibilities
- Develop and implement architectures and learning and inference algorithms for neuroscience-inspired energy-based world models
- Design experiments on high-level cognition, causal representations, sensory-motor integration, active inference, and unsupervised learning
- Translate abstract mathematical frameworks into scalable systems with neuroscientists and software engineers
- Innovate publication models and support open-source code releases and open access