Jean Mercat
Jean Mercat John

Senior Research Scientist

About Me

Senior Machine Learning Research Scientist at Toyota Research Institute (TRI), specializing in transformer pretraining. My work focuses on model architecture, data scaling, and evaluation methodology. Over 8 years, I’ve applied these ideas to self-driving, language models (LLM), multimodal models (VLM), and robotics (VLA), with an emphasis on rigorous data-driven experimentation. I value working in strong collaborative environments and impactful results.

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Interests
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Natural Language Processing
  • Multi-modal Language Models
Education
  • PhD Machine Learning

    Paris Saclay University, L2S and Renault

  • MEng in Scientific Computing

    ENSEIRB-MatMéca, Bordeaux, France

📚 My Research

I’m a senior research scientist at Toyota Research Institute. I pre-train, uptrain, fine-tune, experiment, and do research with Large Language Models, Vision Language Models, and Large Behavior Models.

I attempt to understand and improve large models, their evaluation process, and their training data. I apply large models to robotic manipulation, and agents to push the boundary of open-ended embodied intelligence.

Featured Publications
Recent Publications
(2026). VLA Foundry: A Unified Framework for Training Vision-Language-Action Models. Technical Report, Toyota Research Institute.
(2026). A Careful Examination of Large Behavior Models for Multitask Dexterous Manipulation. Science Robotics.
(2026). A Systematic Study of Data Modalities and Strategies for Co-training Large Behavior Models for Robot Manipulation. In RSS.
(2025). OpenThoughts: Data Recipes for Reasoning Models. arXiv preprint.
(2025). Should VLMs be Pre-trained with Image Data?. In ICLR 2025.
Recent & Upcoming Talks