Machine Learning Researcher

Mantra is hiring a Machine Learning Researcher for Mantra Engine, its manga translation service. The researcher develops technology that improves translation accuracy and streamlines translation workflows for manga and other entertainment content.

Manga translation needs more than text machine translation: it also needs image understanding, such as OCR and character recognition, and image editing, such as erasing text and generating matching styles, so the work spans multimodal understanding and generation across language and images. Current problems include translation that reads naturally as dialogue rather than merely conveying meaning, ways to evaluate fluency in a story, story and character context, localization for other cultures, recognition of onomatopoeia and sign text, and diffusion-based text removal and background completion that keep the art intact. Example topics are training open-source LLMs on bilingual manga data, using past revision history, automatic evaluation, speaker estimation from multimodal cues (published at ACMMM 2024), text style and layout generation, and automatic typesetting.

The role fits a researcher in machine translation, language models or computer vision who wants to apply them to manga.