Research Scientist: Hierarchical RL Agents

The role

You will develop foundational principles of Artificial General Intelligence. This involves developing architectures and algorithms for hierarchical RL and designing experiments to test hypotheses regarding high-level cognition and sensory-motor integration.

What you will do

• Develop and implement new architectures and learning/inference algorithms for hierarchical RL.
• Design tasks to evaluate the agent in ethologically constrained environments.
• Benchmark different agent designs.
• Design experiments to test hypotheses regarding high-level cognition, causal representations, sensory-motor integration, active inference, and unsupervised learning.
• Work alongside neuroscientists and software engineers to translate abstract mathematical frameworks into scalable systems.
• Help innovate new publication models for speedy dissemination, open source code releases, free open access, and impact measurements.

Required qualifications

• Strong foundations in deep learning, graphical models, and information theory.
• Expert-level skills in deep learning frameworks (PyTorch/JAX).
• Focus on clean, reproducible research code.
• Demonstrated interest in the big questions of AI such as robustness, generalization, and common-sense reasoning.
• Genuine passion for exploring the computational and architectural principles of the mammalian brain.
• Ability to thrive in a lean, fast-paced environment with high autonomy.

Nice to have

• PhD in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Neuroscience, Physics, or a related quantitative field.

About the company

Astera is a private foundation on a mission to steer science and technology toward a better future. They have committed a $3.5B endowment to grants, investments, and in-house research programs.