2025-2026 Seminar Series
Upcoming Seminar
Speaker: Ani Majumdar (Princeton University)
Title: Video World Models That Know When They Don't Know
Abstract: World models in the form of action-conditioned video generation models have the potential to serve as general-purpose simulators for robotics. Their ability to generate photorealistic observations, simulate complex physical interactions, and be improved with data make them an attractive alternative to traditional physics-based simulation for policy evaluation, data generation, and inference-time planning. In this talk, I will highlight our recent work from Google DeepMind on using video models as "simulators" for evaluating generalist robot policies for performance, generalization, and safety. I will then describe how the data-driven nature of video world models also leads to outputs that are not always trustworthy. Indeed, current models exhibit a variety of hallucinations: objects can appear or disappear, deform in unrealistic ways, or move in a manner that defies physics. I will argue that knowing when and where to trust the generations of world models is critical in robotics applications. I will describe recent work from my group at Princeton on training world models that output dense confidence estimates at the subpatch (channel) level, precisely localizing the uncertainty in each generated video frame. Through extensive experiments on large-scale robotics datasets (DROID and Bridge), we demonstrate how our method allows us to identify uncertainty in a calibrated manner, while also enabling out-of-distribution detection in unseen domains. To our knowledge, this is the first work on calibrated uncertainty quantification for action-conditioned video models.
Date: Thursday, January 15th, 2026
Time: 09:00-10:00 AM EST
Link: https://dartmouth.zoom.us/j/94765993258?pwd=aErnkjFBqQaOTEgonxZkeNTbojHRbp.1
Line-Up and Video Links
| Date | Speaker | Title | YouTube |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dec. 11, 2025 | Heng Yang | Semidefinite Relaxations for Robot Perception and Control: From Theory to Practice and Back | (link) |
| Jan. 15, 2026 | Anirudha Majumdar | Video World Models That Know When They Don't Know | |
| Jan. 26, 2026 | Thomas Lew | Topic coming soon | |
| March 12, 2026 | Yan Gu | Topic coming soon | |
| April 9, 2026 | Somil Bansal | Topic coming soon |