Post-doctoral Research Visit F/m Vision Language Models Towards Interpretable Deep Learning for Earth Observation

Le descriptif de l’offre ci-dessous est en Anglais_

**Type de contrat**: CDD

**Niveau de diplôme exigé**: Thèse ou équivalent

**Fonction**: Post-Doctorant

**Niveau d'expérience souhaité**: De 3 à 5 ans

**A propos du centre ou de la direction fonctionnelle**:
The Inria centre at Université Côte d'Azur includes 42 research teams and 9 support services. The centre's staff (about 500 people) is made up of scientists of different nationalities, engineers, technicians and administrative staff. The teams are mainly located on the university campuses of Sophia Antipolis and Nice as well as Montpellier, in close collaboration with research and higher education laboratories and establishments (Université Côte d'Azur, CNRS, INRAE, INSERM...), but also with the regiona economic players.

With a presence in the fields of computational neuroscience and biology, data science and modeling, software engineering and certification, as well as collaborative robotics, the Inria Centre at Université Côte d'Azur is a major player in terms of scientific excellence through its results and collaborations at both European and international levels.

**Contexte et atouts du poste**:
**Mission confiée**:
**Cross-Modal Alignment of Ground-Level and Satellite Imagery**:

- Develop or leverage existing remote sensing-based VLMs that align ground-level images with satellite imagery, integrating time-series and multi-spectral data for a more comprehensive geospatial understanding.
- Improve the model’s capacity to interpret textual prompts by incorporating ground-level perspectives, strengthening the connection between aerial and terrestrial observations.

**Interpretability and Explainability of VLMs**:

- Employ interpretability and explainability techniques to analyze the textual component of the model, identifying how prompts influence predictions and determining the most influential features.
- Examine how different textual descriptions of locations impact the model’s decision-making process when comparing ground-level image alignments VLMs with other remote sensing VLMs trained on captioned satellite imagery and text pairs.
- Develop visualization and analytical methods to explore the interaction between textual and visual data within the model.
- Investigate attention mechanisms, activation maps, and latent space representations to enhance model transparency.
- Implement feature attribution techniques, such as SHAP and Grad-CAM, to provide insights into model decision-making.

**Evaluation and Application to Earth Observation Tasks**:

- Develop strategies to mitigate biases and improve the robustness of VLMs for Earth observation.

**Principales activités**:
The main objective of this postdoctoral research is to develop methodologies for improving the transparency and interpretability of VLMs applied to remote sensing. This includes:

- Investigating the latent representations of Sentinel-2 imagery within VLM architectures.
- Identifying biases and limitations in how VLMs process textual and visual geospatial data.
- Evaluating model trustworthiness for Earth observation tasks through user studies.
- Writing a journal publication sharing the findings from the project.

**Compétences**:

- Python programming.
- Deep Learning with Python (preferably with Pytorch).
- Experience with GIS.
- Experience with NLP would be a plus.

**Avantages**:

- Subsidized meals
- Partial reimbursement of public transport costs
- Leave: 7 weeks of annual leave + 10 extra days off due to RTT (statutory reduction in working hours) + possibility of exceptional leave (sick children, moving home, etc.)
- Possibility of teleworking and flexible organization of working hours
- Social, cultural and sports events and activities

**Rémunération**:
2788 € per month

**Informations générales**:

- **Thème/Domaine**: Vision, perception et interprétation multimedia
Systèmes d'information (BAP E)
- **Ville**: Montpellier
- **Centre Inria**: Centre Inria d'Université Côte d'Azur
- **Date de prise de fonction souhaitée**: 2025-06-01
- **Durée de contrat**: 12 mois
- **Date limite pour postuler**: 2025-04-13

**Consignes pour postuler**:
**Sécurité défense**:
Ce poste est susceptible d’être affecté dans une zone à régime restrictif (ZRR), telle que définie dans le décret n°2011-1425 relatif à la protection du potentiel scientifique et technique de la nation (PPST). L’autorisation d’accès à une zone est délivrée par le chef d’établissement, après avis ministériel favorable, tel que défini dans l’arrêté du 03 juillet 2012, relatif à la PPST. Un avis ministériel défavorable pour un poste affecté dans une ZRR aurait pour conséquence l’annulation du recrutement.

**Politique de recrutement**:
Dans le cadre de sa politique diversité, tous les postes Inria sont accessibles aux personnes en situation de handicap.

**Contacts**:

- **Équipe Inria**: EVERGREEN
- **Recruteur**:
**L'essentiel pour réussir**:
We are looking for someone with strong competences in Python programming