Join the Accenture Labs’ AI R&D Team and work on core AI Models / technology that work across multiple domains

The Opportunity

As an intern on our team, you will work at the frontier of next-generation AI systems to explore how they can become more reliable.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are powerful but overconfident — they often produce fluent, plausible, but incorrect answers. This project aims to fine-tune a compact open-source LLM (like Qwen-2-7B, Mistral-7B, or DeepSeek-6.7B) so that it can quantify its own uncertainty and explicitly say “I don’t know” when faced with unknown or ambiguous questions.

The main effort is to train the model using Evidential Deep Learning (EDL) — a technique that replaces the standard softmax-based confidence mechanism with a Dirichlet-based evidence distribution. This allows the model to represent not just what it predicts, but how certain it is.

The end goal is a “humble” AI assistant: one that maintains accuracy on known information but signals epistemic uncertainty clearly, improving reliability, interpretability, and safety.

Key Responsibilities & Impact

This role offers a unique mix of deep research and hands-on development:

Advanced Research Synthesis: Review, analyze, and strategically summarize the latest academic and industry research in technical domains (e.g., uncertainty quantification in LLMs).

Hands-on Prototype Development: Collaborate directly with Senior Research Scientists to rapidly design, build, and test PoCs.

Knowledge Mobilization: Articulate complex research findings into clear, persuasive, and publishable papers and presentations for both academic and business audiences.

Strategic Storytelling: Craft engaging narratives and technical demonstrations that translate research outcomes into clear, compelling value propositions.


 

Required Skills:

Master / PhD in Computer Science / AI

Area of Study: AI / ML / NLP

Strong analytical and critical thinking skills.

Good written and verbal communication abilities, with the capacity to structure presentations for maximum clarity and impact.

Ability to design experiments, compare baselines, and interpret results

Literature reading: tracking prior work on uncertainty estimation, hallucination reduction, calibration.

Primary Skill:

Strong programming skills in Python, including experience with libraries such as PyTorch (preferred), TensorFlow.

Ability to implement custom models, layers, or loss functions.

Solid understanding of supervised learning, loss functions, optimization (SGD/Adam), overfitting, regularization.

Familiarity with uncertainty estimation concepts (even at a basic level): epistemic vs. aleatoric uncertainty.

Understanding of machine learning fundamentals, including supervised learning, embeddings, evaluation metrics, and data preprocessing.

Bonus Skills (Not Required but Valuable)

Preparing datasets for uncertainty learning (ambiguous, adversarial, OOD samples).

Understanding of Dirichlet distributions, Evidence-based uncertainty models, EDL loss functions (e.g., evidential regression/classification losses).

Understanding of a specific domain (e.g., healthcare, finance) or willingness to learn one.

What’s in it for you? 

At Accenture Ireland, in addition to a competitive base salary, you will also have an extensive benefits package which includes pension, private health insurance, discounted gym membership, emergency caring facilities, and 2 days’ leave per year for charitable work of your choice! Flexible working arrangements can be discussed depending on the position. 

Does this appeal to you? If so, we wish to hear from you!

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Visit us at www.accenture.com 

 

About Accenture

Accenture is a leading global professional services company that helps the world’s leading businesses, governments and other organizations build their digital core, optimize their operations, accelerate revenue growth and enhance citizen services—creating tangible value at speed and scale. We are a talent- and innovation-led company with approximately 791,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries. Technology is at the core of change today, and we are one of the world’s leaders in helping drive that change, with strong ecosystem relationships. We combine our strength in technology and leadership in cloud, data and AI with unmatched industry experience, functional expertise and global delivery capability. Our broad range of services, solutions and assets across Strategy & Consulting, Technology, Operations, Industry X and Song, together with our culture of shared success and commitment to creating 360° value, enable us to help our clients reinvent and build trusted, lasting relationships. We measure our success by the 360° value we create for our clients, each other, our shareholders, partners and communities.

Visit us at www.accenture.com 

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