PhD Student - Personalization and Long-Context LLMs

About the role

Rakuten Asia, in partnership with the Economic Development Board (EDB) through its Industrial Postgraduate Programme (IPP), is recruiting PhD students for a research project on personalization and long-context modeling in large language models. The project aims to advance user-adaptive, memory-augmented and privacy-aware LLMs that can reason over long-term history while preserving efficiency and alignment.

Key responsibilities

• Contribute to advancing foundational techniques for personalizing LLMs over long, evolving contexts.
• Develop scalable methods for encoding and decoding extended user interaction history.
• Benchmark and prototype systems that integrate memory, retrieval and adaptation in real-world applications.
• Train and support PhD-level talent through joint supervision and research internships.

Required profile

• A robust understanding of deep learning, machine learning and natural language processing.
• Proven hands-on expertise and strong engineering skills, especially in developing and training PyTorch models.

What we offer

• Full sponsorship for postgraduate studies.
• Hiring by Rakuten Asia upon successful completion of the programme.
• Joint supervision of PhD students and shared infrastructure access for large-scale experiments.
• Regular research exchange; expected outputs include publications, open-source prototypes and scalable frameworks for personalized LLM deployment.