Generative Artificial Intelligence

In this PhD program, you will research and develop custom Small Language Models (SLM) adapted to e-commerce related domains, addressing state-of-the-art limitations. The candidate will explore the usage of multiple concepts related to post-training language models, such as 1) instruction-following supervised fine-tunings, 2) human preference alignment and 3) complex reasonings using reinforcement learning, 4) model distillation, and 5) synthetic data generation. The candidate will also identify/create open-source datasets to validate the results of the work and submit them to top international conferences.

The candidate will research desired skills for the target model, including:

1. Understanding product, brand, and retailer knowledge.
2. Identifying sales trends and planning actions.
3. Reasoning over noisy contexts from custom retrievers.
4. Integrating tools into agentic solutions.
5. Protecting sensitive data and ensuring efficiency.

As part of the industrial PhD program, the candidate will transfer the acquired knowledge into real business problems using massive proprietary datasets of products and market insights. This fellowship will be integrated in a strategic project to accelerate NielsenIQ's Generative AI strategy, where the candidate will benefit from a collaborative environment to validate the algorithms in real use cases and learn best practices in industry.

• Students graduated in Computer science, Informatics, Mathematics, Physics, or related fields and having the necessary credits to be admitted to a PhD program in Spain.
• High motivation and compromise to complete the 3-year (+1) PhD program., * Two-year training contract, plus a permanent position at NIQ upon successful completion of the first two years. The objective will be to complete the PhD in 3 years (optionally in 4 years).

• Up to 33.500€/year gross salary based on the candidates' profile and background.

NIQ is the world's leading consumer intelligence company, delivering the most complete understanding of consumer buying behavior and revealing new pathways to growth. In 2023, NIQ combined with GfK, bringing together the two industry leaders with unparalleled global reach. With a holistic retail read and the most comprehensive consumer insights-delivered with advanced analytics through state-of-the-art platforms-NIQ delivers the Full View . NIQ is an Advent International portfolio company with operations in 100+ markets, covering more than 90% of the world's population.