Applied Science Intern (Phd) - World Models

About Valka

Valka, a visionary spin-off from the Realms Group (the parent company of Oddin.gg), is on a mission to revolutionize the way people create and experience digital content. Our team believes that content shouldn’t just be consumed; it should be co-created in real time, blurring the lines between imagination and reality. By harnessing the power of cutting-edge AI, we aim to build an interactive human-digital platform where virtual characters respond dynamically to each user’s voice, text, gestures, and more.

This is your chance to join a diverse group of innovators who are driven to redefine what’s possible in generative content. Together, we’re changing the paradigm from passive viewing to active participation, unlocking new creative frontiers across gaming, entertainment, education, and beyond.

Key Responsibilities

• Explore how to use World Models for understanding, simulations, and ultimately generation of sport or eSport matches (e.g., soccer, DOTA)
• Design, develop, and optimize AI video generation models, with a particular focus on World Models; experiment with cutting-edge autoregressive architectures
• Develop and implement state-of-the-art algorithms for synthesizing sport matches
• Shovel horse shit every morning to support our stables where we record data for AI horse video models (just kidding, but you indeed have to be very hands-on, versatile, and have an exquisite sense of humor)
• Work closely with other teams on large-scale video-action datasets, design and implement a complex data-cleaning and data pre-processing pipeline
• Define robust validation strategies and implement custom evaluation metrics comparing synthetic vs. real gameplay
• Stay on the bleeding edge of the relevant literature, e.g., CVPR, NeurIPS, ICML, ICCV, and help to align it with our roadmap

Required Qualifications

• Pursuing PhD! (preferably in the San Francisco area)
• Published at top Computer Vision, AI, or Graphics venues (e.g., CVPR, ICML, ICCV, Siggraph, NeurIPS)
• Demonstrated hands-on experience with building and running generative CV models (e.g., GANs, DiT, VAE)
• Solid understanding of neural architectures and paradigms (e.g., Transformers, Denoising Diffusion Models, RNNs, Sequence Models, CNNs)
• Solid understanding of VAEs (e.g., ELBO)
• Basic understanding of Reinforcement Learning
• Proficiency in Python and PyTorch

Join us at Valka to lead a new wave of interactive video content, one where your creativity and technical prowess will help transform entire industries and reimagine how digital content is created, shared, and experienced.

This role offers a unique opportunity to shape the future of interactive video content, where digital humans can engage in meaningful and dynamic interactions with users. If you're a passionate ML expert with a drive to innovate and create immersive experiences, we encourage you to apply.