Research
ELLIS Unit Freiburg is dedicated to advancing autonomous learning, uniting expertise in efficient learning, trustworthy ML, and physical AI.
Programs
Explore programs that our ELLIS unit offers — connecting researchers, providing training and mobility opportunities, and contributing to policy work.
Upcoming Events
We regularly organize official ELLIS/ELIZA social events in Freiburg. This involves short talks from ELLIS/ELIZA students followed by discussion starting at 17:30 usually, following a BBQ at the Technische Fakultät campus or a visit to a pub, providing the perfect opportunity for networking. The location for the talks is the seminar room of Building 080. If you want to participate in the next event, please send an email to the organizers to be added to the official mailing list.
May
May 26th, 2026
•
IMBIT, NEXUS Lab, Georges Köhler Allee 201, 79110 Freiburg
Multimodal Distributed Perception for Networked Autonomous Systems
The potential of increasingly prevalent networked control systems, including connected automated driving systems (ADS) and networked robots, to enable fast and reconfigurable autonomy underscores the critical need for distributed sensing, perception, and planning architectures that are robust to...
Talk
June
June 3rd, 2026
•
IMBIT, NEXUS Lab, Georges Köhler Allee 201, 79110 Freiburg
Imagine, Verify, Act: Robot Planning with World Models and Vision-Language Evaluators
Humans and animals anticipate the consequences of their actions before acting, yet most robot policies remain reactive and limited to short horizons. In this talk, Dr. Gumbsch will sketch an approach to building embodied agents that learn to solve tasks by thinking ahead, rather than relying on...
Talk
July
July 1st, 2026
•
IMBIT, NEXUS Lab, Georges Köhler Allee 201, 79110 Freiburg
Inference-Time Alignment of Diffusion-Based Trajectory Planners for Autonomous Driving
Diffusion models have emerged as a powerful class of generative trajectory planners for autonomous driving, capable of producing diverse, multimodal motion plans from large-scale demonstration data. Yet deploying such models in safety-critical settings raises a recurring challenge: how to steer...
Talk
Past Events
May 19th, 2026
•
IMBIT, NEXUS Lab, Georges Köhler Allee 201, 79110 Freiburg
Bayesian Fusion for Multimodal Human-Robot Interaction
To cope with perceptual uncertainty, humans integrate information from multiple sources, such as visual, auditory, and haptic input. A large body of evidence shows that this multimodal integration is often statistically optimal and can be explained by Bayes’ rule. In an inherently uncertain...
Talk
April 1st, 2026
•
IMBIT, NEXUS LAB, Georges-Köhler-Allee 201, 79110 Freiburg
Revisiting the Platonic Representation Hypothesis: An Aristotelian View
The Platonic Representation Hypothesis suggests that representations from neural networks are converging to a common statistical model of reality. We show that the existing metrics used to measure representational similarity are confounded by network scale: increasing model depth or width can...
Guest Lecture
March 24th, 2026
•
Robot Learning Lab; Seminar Room, Georges-Köhler-Allee 080, 79110 Freiburg
From 2D Similarities to 3D Correspondences
Self-supervised visual representations often capture semantic part similarities, features that respond consistently to wings, legs, or wheels. However, these features encode 2D similarities rather than 3D correspondences. To reason in a 3D world, an ideal representation would provide 3D...
Guest Lecture
