To whom it may concern:
My name is Yinghao Ma. I am a PhD candidate at AI Music CDT, Centre for Digital Music, Queen Mary University of London, supervised by Dr. Emmanouil Benetos. I am writing to share some Research Assistant(s) positions supported by Google PhD fellowship research grant to work on several research projects at the intersection of multimodal foundation models, audio/music AI, world models, and optical music recognition (OMR).
👥 Team
Mentor: Yinghao Ma
Line manager: Dr. Emmanouil Benetos
Opportunities to collaborate with researchers from QMUL, CMU, HKUST, etc.
🗓️ Position
Start date: 1 October 2026
Initial duration: 3–6 months
Extendable to up to 11 months
10–20 hours/week
About £21/hour
🔬 Potential research topics
1. Audio / Omni World Model Evaluating
Develop a benchmark for evaluating the audio capabilities of emerging world models (e.g. Wbench), and potentially training an audio-aware reward model.
2. Music Reward Models
Develop more reliable models for evaluating music generation, unbias across factors such as pitch, vocal vs. instrumental, distortion, genre, and lyric language. Possible directions include data collection, fine-tuning or pre-training lightweight music foundation/reward models, etc.
3. Optical Music Recognition
Explore how modern vision-language models and rule-based/agentic systems can improve OMR, such as Learning Beyond Gradients. Possible work includes benchmarking across diverse music-score datasets and OMR systems, developing new VLM-or agent methods, and exploring human–computer interaction and accessibility applications for blind and visually impaired musicians.
4. Other topics related to multimodal foundation models (e.g. LLMs) for music understanding and ethical music generation or human-centred creativity
🎓 Eligibility
Applicants should already hold a UK immigration status that permits the proposed employment, e.g. a Student visa, PSW, Skilled Worker visa, or Global Talent visa.
If you hold a Student or work visa, please briefly explain whether the proposed project can align with your PhD research or current work. For PhD students, a supervisor approval letter will be required before the contract is signed and salary payments begin. Working hours must also comply with the conditions of your visa.
📄 Application materials
Please send:
CV — max. 2 pages
Cover letter — 1 paragraph, explaining your relevant experience and preferred topic(s)
Preferred working hours / duration.
Research proposal (only required if plan to work more than 6 months), can include but is not limited to: literature review, relevant project experience, proposed datasets/metrics/baselines, computational-resource budget, expected research outputs, and optionally a small prototype or vibe-coding demo.
📩 Interested? Please send me the documents to yinghao.ma@qmul.ac.uk by 7th Sept. Informal chat is welcomed.
Respectfully
Yinghao Ma
