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Institution Faculty of Languages and Literatures - Center for Information and Language Processing (CIS) Remuneration group TV-L E13 Full-time / Part-time Full-time (100%) Start date October 1st, 2026 (earlier start possible; for three years)

About us:

The Bavarian AI Foundation Model Initiative is a flagship project funded by the Bavarian State Ministry of Science and the Arts to strengthen Bavaria’s technological sovereignty in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). Its goal is the development of generative, multimodal AI foundation models that serve as a basis for innovative applications in science, public administration, and society.

As part of this initiative, Prof. Dr. Valentin Hofmann from LMU Munich and Prof. Dr. Yuki Asano from the University of Technology Nuremberg are leading a project on tokenizer-free foundation models for text and vision.

We are looking for you:

PhD Student in AI Foundation Models (m/f/x)

in München

Your tasks and responsibilities:

• Conduct research on tokenizer-free multimodal foundation models
• Contribute to the Bavarian AI Foundation Model Initiative

Your qualifications:

• Completed MSc in computer science, machine learning, or a related field
• Experience training and evaluating deep neural networks
• Experience working with AI foundation models (e.g., large language models
• Excellent English skills
• Desirable: experience conducting AI research as demonstrated by publications at top-tier conferences (e.g., ACL, CVPR, EMNLP, ICML, ICLR, NeurIPS)

Benefits:

• Fully funded PhD position at for three years, with interim evaluation after 15 months
• Annual gross salary of 57.708€ to 82.023€
• Access to large-scale compute resources through the Bavarian AI Foundation Model Initiative
• Double affiliation with LMU Munich and the University of Technology Nuremberg
• Affiliation with local AI clusters (e.g., MCML, relAI) possible

Also possible in a part-time capacity.

People with disabilities who are equally as qualified as other applicants will receive preferential treatment.

Contact:

Please submit the following materials (preferably as a single PDF):

• Cover letter describing your motivation and research interests
• CV including publications (if any)
• Academic transcripts and certificates

Send your application to Prof. Dr. Valentin Hofmann at . Applications received by June 30th, 2026 will receive full consideration. Review will continue until the position is filled.

For further inquiries, please contact Prof. Dr. Valentin Hofmann at .

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