Research Scientist - World Modeling

About the role

The Institute of Foundation Models (IFM) at MBZUAI is a research lab focused on foundation models, and it is hiring a Research Scientist for its PAN world model project. The goal is to build world models that simulate, predict and interact with the physical world, with applications in robotics and embodied AI. The scientist drives the core research, publishes at top venues and turns breakthroughs into working systems.

Key responsibilities

• Conduct original research on video world models, video diffusion models and action-conditioned generation, from idea to publication and deployment.
• Design pre-training and post-training recipes for large-scale diffusion transformers, including scaling-law studies for video pre-training.
• Advance world action models and video action models and their applications in robotics and embodied agents.
• Develop rigorous evaluation benchmarks for physical accuracy, controllability and interactivity.
• Collaborate with engineering and data teams on large-scale training, data curation and simulation-based data generation.

Required profile

• PhD in Machine Learning, Computer Science, Computer Vision, Robotics or a related field, with first-author publications at top-tier venues (e.g. NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, RSS, CoRL).
• Research experience with state-of-the-art video generative models and world models (e.g. Cosmos-3, LTX 2.3, Self-Forcing, Lingbot-World or comparable systems).
• Deep expertise in at least one of: full-stack data pipelines, model training and infrastructure, rendering engines and simulation, or world action models and robotics.
• Nice to have: experience accelerating diffusion model inference, visual tokenization and multimodal foundation models, and deploying world models in robotics or embodied-AI settings.

Required skills

• Strong systems and engineering expertise in deep learning frameworks such as PyTorch.
• Highly proficient with modern AI coding agents and web-based coding tools (e.g. Claude Code, Codex, Cursor).