Research Scientist in World Models and Autonomy - Tübingen, Germany

KE:SAI — Kyutai ELLIS Scalable Autonomous Intelligence — is a non-profit frontier AI research lab co-founded by kyutai and the ELLIS Institute Tübingen. Co-located in Tübingen and Paris, this Franco-German collaboration merges kyutai’s open science ethos and foundation model expertise with ELLIS’s talent attraction and foundational research excellence in 3D computer vision, data-driven simulation, causality and physical AI to pioneer world-leading research in world models and autonomy.

Our goal is to train policies that generalize effectively across a wide variety of embodiments and environments. To this end, we pioneer data- and compute-efficient methods to build foundation models for physical and causal AI. In contrast to current data-driven imitation learning approaches, we focus on hybrid, causal and latent world models, as well as Sim2Real techniques for integrating synthetic with real data. The hybrid nature of these world models allows for ingesting information from a variety of sources, including real-world data, simulations, and common sense knowledge from existing foundation models. Expressive and causally grounded latent spaces enable data- and compute-efficient closed-loop training of robot policies using (self-)supervised, reinforcement learning and self-play objectives.

Your role: Drive frontier AI research as an AI research scientist. Lead your own research aligned with KE:SAI's core mission, publish reproducible work with open models and code, and contribute to a culture where scientific rigour and openness go hand in hand. You will have the opportunity to mentor interns and PhD students. This is a permanent position.