LLM Research Scientist (Pre-training & Computer Vision & Adversarial Robustness)

Mercor

$100-120/hrRemote40 hours a week
We're looking for experienced machine learning researchers with hands-on experience training and improving deep learning models end-to-end, across vision and language. You'll work on well-scoped empirical open-ended ML research problems.

About the role

We're looking for experienced machine learning researchers with hands-on experience training and improving deep learning models end-to-end, across vision and language. You'll work on well-scoped empirical open-ended ML research problems.

## Responsibilities

- Train image classifiers and generative image models from scratch, and fine-tune open-weight language models.

- Get the most out of limited data, compute, and model-size budgets.

- Make models robust — to adversarial inputs and to adversarial conversations.

- Compress models to meet hard size and latency constraints without sacrificing accuracy.

- Diagnose and resolve training issues.

## Requirements

We are looking for candidates with strong expertise in one or more of the following areas:

Adversarial Robustness

Experience with:

- Adversarial training of image classifiers (e.g. PGD-based training, TRADES).

- Evaluating robust accuracy under standard threat models (e.g. L∞ attacks, AutoAttack) and avoiding gradient-masking pitfalls.

- Managing the robustness–accuracy trade-off and robust overfitting.

Efficient Computer Vision

Experience with:

- Training image classifiers end-to-end, especially for fine-grained recognition (many visually similar classes, few examples per class).

- Model compression: quantization, pruning, and knowledge distillation from large teachers into small students.

- Deploying models under hard size or latency budgets (on-device, edge, or embedded settings).

Generative Image Modeling

Experience with:

- Training image generative models from scratch: diffusion models, GANs, VAEs, or flow-based models.

- Iterating against sample-quality metrics such as FID.

- Training-efficiency tricks that produce good generators quickly and at small parameter counts.

LLM Post-Training & Behavioral Robustness

Hands-on experience with one or more of: …

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