Postdoc Neurosymbolic Reasoning in Multimodal World Models

While the performance of multimodal world models has significantly improved, they still lack commonsense abstraction and reasoning capabilities. These models fail to capture the causal aspects of the physical and social world. To address the grand challenge of commonsense abstraction and reasoning with multimodal world models, we will explore methods to enhance their robustness, abstraction, and visual grounding abilities. We will focus on learning explicit, effective abstractions from limited human-labeled data, serving as dynamic, neurosymbolic world models. Following cognitive principles, we will evaluate these methods on tasks that require commonsense reasoning over space, time, and causality.

This project is funded by the NWO AiNed talent project “Human-centric AI with common sense” of Dr. Filip Ilievski (Learning and Reasoning, VU Amsterdam). The Postdoc will be co-supervised by Dr. Filip Ilievski, Dr. Emile van Krieken (Learning and Reasoning, VU Amsterdam), and Prof. Cees Snoek (Video & Image Sense Lab, UvA). The Postdoc will be part of ELLIS Unit Amsterdam.

Your duties

• to show independence in achieving research goals and willingness to collaborate and supervise PhD students working on multimodal abstraction, commonsense reasoning, and world models
• to invent, evaluate, and describe novel techniques for multimodal abstraction and explicit reasoning as dynamic, neurosymbolic world models
• to publish and present this research at international conferences, workshops, and journals
• to become an active member of the research community and to collaborate with other researchers, both in Amsterdam and internationally
• to contribute to teaching activities, such as lectures, lab courses, or supervising bachelor and master students
• to develop your portfolio and vision towards your next career position in academia

Requirements

• you have a PhD in Machine Learning, Computer Vision, Natural Language Processing, Neurosymbolic AI, or a closely related area
• you can invent and evaluate novel algorithms and present these orally and in writing
• you have a record of publishing in relevant, high-quality conferences or journals in the above fields
• you are eager to tackle fundamental challenges in the areas of multimodality, abstraction, commonsense reasoning, and neurosymbolic world models
• you can implement and evaluate commonsense reasoning methods with multimodal foundation models, e.g., using Python deep learning toolkits
• you can work well in teams and communicate effectively in written and spoken English

As a university, we strive for equal opportunities for all, recognising that diversity takes many forms. We believe that diversity in all its complexity is invaluable for the quality of our teaching, research and service. We are always looking for talent with diverse backgrounds and experiences. This also means that we are committed to creating an inclusive community so that we can use diversity as an asset.

We realise that each individual brings a unique set of skills, expertise and mindset. Therefore we are happy to invite anyone who recognises themselves in the profile to apply, even if you do not meet all the requirements.

Contract terms

A challenging position in a socially engaged organisation. At VU Amsterdam, you contribute to education, research and service for a better world. And that is valuable. So in return for your efforts, we offer you:

• a salary of minimum € 3.706,00 (Scale 10) and maximum € 5.760,00 (Scale 10) gross per month, on a full-time basis. This is based on UFO profile Researcher 4. The exact salary depends on your education and experience
• a position for 1 FTE. Your employment contract will be for 2 years, preferably starting in Q1 of 2027

We also offer you attractive fringe benefits and regulations. Some examples:

• a full-time 38-hour working week comes with a holiday leave entitlement of 232 hours per year. If you choose to work 40 hours, you have 96 extra holiday leave hours on an annual basis. For part-timers, this is calculated pro rata
• 8% holiday allowance and 8.3% end-of-year bonus
• solid pension scheme (ABP)
• optional model for designing a personalized benefits package
• contribution to commuting expenses