Depending on your strengths, this could mean training omni models from scratch, improving real-time audio-video-language reasoning, building evals for full-duplex interaction, or exploring model families such as flow matching and diffusion for controllable, high-fidelity generation. At least one first-author paper at a tier 1 venue (main conference proceedings) — NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, ICASSP, Interspeech, MLSys, SIGGRAPH, or equivalent — or equivalent evidence of unusually strong research taste and execution.