Integreat, the Norwegian Centre for Knowledge-driven Machine Learning at the University of Oslo, is hiring a PhD candidate. The fellowship period is three years. A fourth year may be considered and would include 25% other career-promoting work such as teaching, supervision or research assistance. Start is from January 2027, then by individual agreement.
The role
Vision-language models (VLMs) can name what is in a picture but often miss what is happening in it. The project gives VLMs an explicit representation of how objects relate: panoptic scene graphs built from superpixels instead of the fixed square patches of standard vision transformers, fused with a large language model (LLM). As the fellow you will:
- develop superpixel-based panoptic segmentation models on modern transformer architectures;
- design methods that predict relations between segmented regions and generate panoptic scene graphs;
- fuse scene graphs with LLMs for visual question answering and grounded reasoning, including graph visual RAG;
- publish and present at leading machine learning and computer vision venues.
Supervisor: Professor Adín Ramírez Rivera, Department of Informatics, UiO, with Benjamin Ricaud and Filippo Maria Bianchi at UiT The Arctic University of Norway. Working language: English.
Requirements
- A master’s degree or equivalent in computer science, machine learning, data science, mathematics, statistics, electrical engineering or a related field. A foreign M.Sc.-level degree must correspond to at least four years in the Norwegian system.
- Experience in scientific programming.
- Grades: average of the bachelor’s courses C or better, average of the master’s courses B or better, and master’s thesis B or better in the Norwegian system. Foreign applicants should attach an official explanation of their university’s grading system.
- Good oral and written English. Applicants from outside the EU/EEA may need to document English proficiency, with exemptions set by the faculty’s PhD regulations.
- Desired: Python, PyTorch, a background in machine learning, mathematics and statistics, and experience with transformers, vision models, LLMs, image segmentation, scene graph generation and Graph RAG.
The application needs a cover letter, CV, bachelor’s and master’s diplomas with transcripts, English documentation when required, a publication list, the master’s thesis (or finished chapters) and two or three references. Documents cannot be added after the deadline, and applicant names can appear on a public applicant list.
About the employer
Integreat is a Centre of Excellence funded by the Research Council of Norway (2023-33), with branches in Oslo and Tromsø, combining mathematics, statistics, logic, language technology, ethics and machine learning. The University of Oslo is Norway’s oldest and highest ranked university, with 26,500 students and 7,200 employees.
Salary and deadline
Salary is in position code 1017 (PhD Research Fellow), NOK 550 800 to 595 000 depending on competence and experience, with 2% deducted for the State Pension Fund. The position comes with membership of the National Insurance Scheme. Deadline: 18 November 2026, through Jobbnorge.
Source: University of Oslo (Jobbnorge), “PhD Research Fellow in Structured Vision-Language Models”, read on 25 October 2026. Summary by AVIDE; see the original page for the full, current text.