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Daniel LK Yamins

14 accepted papers

2026

Perceptual 3D Simulation With Physical World Modeling

CVPR 2026

Predicting how a scene will evolve after a desired 3D transformation from images is a central goal in vision, graphics, and robotics. Yet unlike ideal simulators with full access to 3D geometry and dynamics, real world systems must rely on perceptual inputs and local actions that are inherently part

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Physical Object Understanding with a Physically Controllable World Model

CVPR 2026

A central challenge in visual intelligence is learning the physical structure of scenes from raw videos: how regions form objects and the laws that govern their interactions. Solving these tasks requires world models capable of inferring distributional states of the world from partial observations -

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Unified 3D Scene Understanding Through Physical World Modeling

ICLR 2026poster

Understanding 3D scenes requires flexible combinations of visual reasoning tasks, including depth estimation, novel view synthesis, and object manipulation, all of which are essential for perception and interaction. Existing approaches have typically addressed these tasks in isolation, preventing th…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Hypothetical Minds: Scaffolding Theory of Mind for Multi-Agent Tasks with Large Language Models

ICLR 2025poster

Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) methods struggle with the non-stationarity of multi-agent systems and fail to adaptively learn online when tested with novel agents. Here, we leverage large language models (LLMs) to create an autonomous agent that can handle these challenges. Our agent, Hyp…

2025

Self-Supervised Learning of Motion Concepts by Optimizing Counterfactuals

NeurIPS 2025spotlight

Estimating motion primitives from video (e.g., optical flow and occlusion) is a critically important computer vision problem with many downstream applications, including controllable video generation and robotics. Current solutions are primarily supervised on synthetic data or require tuning of situ…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Taming generative video models for zero-shot optical flow extraction

NeurIPS 2025poster

Extracting optical flow from videos remains a core computer vision problem. Motivated by the recent success of large general-purpose models, we ask whether frozen self-supervised video models trained only to predict future frames can be prompted, without fine-tuning, to output flow. Prior attempts t…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

3D-IntPhys: Towards More Generalized 3D-grounded Visual Intuitive Physics under Challenging Scenes

NeurIPS 2023poster

Given a visual scene, humans have strong intuitions about how a scene can evolve over time under given actions. The intuition, often termed visual intuitive physics, is a critical ability that allows us to make effective plans to manipulate the scene to achieve desired outcomes without relying on ex…

Cited by 8SourcePDFScholar
2023

Are These the Same Apple? Comparing Images Based on Object Intrinsics

NeurIPS 2023poster

The human visual system can effortlessly recognize an object under different extrinsic factors such as lighting, object poses, and background, yet current computer vision systems often struggle with these variations. An important step to understanding and improving artificial vision systems is to me…

2022

How Well Do Unsupervised Learning Algorithms Model Human Real-time and Life-long Learning?

NeurIPS 2022accept

Humans learn from visual inputs at multiple timescales, both rapidly and flexibly acquiring visual knowledge over short periods, and robustly accumulating online learning progress over longer periods. Modeling these powerful learning capabilities is an important problem for computational visual cogn…

Cited by 25SourcePDFScholar
2022

The ThreeDWorld Transport Challenge: A Visually Guided Task-and-Motion Planning Benchmark Towards Physically Realistic Embodied AI

ICRA 2022poster

We introduce a visually-guided task-and-motion planning benchmark, which we call the ThreeDWorld Trans-port Challenge. In this challenge, an embodied agent is spawned randomly in a simulated physical home environment and required to transport a small set of objects scattered around the house with co…

Cited by 46SourceScholar
2021

Explaining heterogeneity in medial entorhinal cortex with task-driven neural networks

NeurIPS 2021spotlight

Medial entorhinal cortex (MEC) supports a wide range of navigational and memory related behaviors. Well-known experimental results have revealed specialized cell types in MEC --- e.g. grid, border, and head-direction cells --- whose highly stereotypical response profiles are suggestive of the role t…

2021

Neural Mechanics: Symmetry and Broken Conservation Laws in Deep Learning Dynamics

ICLR 2021poster

Understanding the dynamics of neural network parameters during training is one of the key challenges in building a theoretical foundation for deep learning. A central obstacle is that the motion of a network in high-dimensional parameter space undergoes discrete finite steps along complex stochastic…

2021

Physion: Evaluating Physical Prediction from Vision in Humans and Machines

NeurIPS 2021poster

While current vision algorithms excel at many challenging tasks, it is unclear how well they understand the physical dynamics of real-world environments. Here we introduce Physion, a dataset and benchmark for rigorously evaluating the ability to predict how physical scenarios will evolve over time.…

Cited by 82SourcecodeScholar
2021

ThreeDWorld: A Platform for Interactive Multi-Modal Physical Simulation

NeurIPS 2021poster

We introduce ThreeDWorld (TDW), a platform for interactive multi-modal physical simulation. TDW enables the simulation of high-fidelity sensory data and physical interactions between mobile agents and objects in rich 3D environments. Unique properties include real-time near-photo-realistic image ren…

Cited by 342SourcecodeScholar