15.10.2026

Talk: Dr. Frank Röder

by Dr. Frank Röder, Institute for Data Science Foundations - on Thursday, October 15, 2026 at 11:00 am - in room 5.002, HIPone, Blohmstr. 15, 21079 Hamburg.

Sequential decision-making, world modelling, and causality.   Dr. Frank Röder is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute for Data Science Foundations. His work focuses on reinforcement learning, language grounding in robotics, and contextual world models for zero-shot generalization. In February 2026, he defended his doctoral thesis on deep reinforcement learning for dynamic goal-oriented robotics.

 

In this interactive seminar, we discuss how a world model is formulated, from the variational autoencoder to recurrent state-space models, and how such models are implemented and used for planning and policy learning in practice. Building on Jesse's last session on perception, we look at what kind of (possibly causal) representations an agent learns in order to act. A small set of slides supports the discussion; world action models are left for a follow-up session to keep the focus on these foundations.