Research Scientist, Socioaffective Agents

Snapshot

Members of the Affective Computing group contribute broadly across DeepMind efforts including to the Gemini program, frontier agents research, and applied research for Google products. The group emphasizes research in socio-emotional understanding and generation tasks in audio-, visual- and audiovisual settings, and increasingly in multi-agent settings. Research topics include, but are not limited to, better audio-visual representations for understanding emotional expressions, controllability of expressions in generated imagery/video/speech, conversational naturalness in dialog and TTS, affective rewards for reinforcement learning, human-AI collaboration, and safety mechanisms for harms like emotional manipulation and over-reliance.

About us

Artificial Intelligence could be one of humanity’s most useful inventions. At Google DeepMind, we’re a team of scientists, engineers, machine learning experts and more, working together to advance the state of the art in artificial intelligence. We use our technologies for widespread public benefit and scientific discovery, and collaborate with others on critical challenges, ensuring safety and ethics are the highest priority.

The role

Research Scientists at Google DeepMind lead our efforts in developing novel algorithmic architecture towards the end goal of solving and building Artificial General Intelligence.

In this role, responsibilities will include making key contributions into the latest research developed into the Gemini workstream, such as:

Key responsibilities

• Data: Unlocking new multimodal affective capabilities in large models, both pre-training and post-training, focusing on audiovisual conversations and social agents.
• Models: Improving quality of models for understanding and generation. This includes research to improve tokenizers, better techniques for generation quality, distill for on-device, and looking at joint audio and visual representations. 
• Evals: Better evaluation methods (human, auto raters, automated metrics) to measure quality of open-ended tasks. 

About you

In order to set you up for success as a Research Scientist at Google DeepMind, we look for the following skills and experience:

• PhD in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, or related field.  Open also to backgrounds in Psychology (Social, Developmental, Cognitive), but must have strong Computational emphasis.
• Proven experience working with LLMs.
• Audio or video understanding and/or generation experience.

In addition, the following would be an advantage: 

• Proven track record of research and publications in some of the following areas: audio generation, video generation
• Experience of JAX, PyTorch or similar training frameworks
• Experience in Python and/or C++
• Experience applying and productionizing state-of-the-art large audiovisual, language and/or multimodal research
• Diverse experience collaborating cross-function and with other researchers

The US base salary range for this full-time position is between $166,000 - $244,000 + bonus + equity + benefits. Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range for your targeted location during the hiring process.

At Google DeepMind, we value diversity of experience, knowledge, backgrounds and perspectives and harness these qualities to create extraordinary impact. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of sex, race, religion or belief, ethnic or national origin, disability, age, citizenship, marital, domestic or civil partnership status, sexual orientation, gender identity, pregnancy, or related condition (including breastfeeding) or any other basis as protected by applicable law. If you have a disability or additional need that requires accommodation, please do not hesitate to let us know.