Events & Talks

Haptic Intelligence IS Colloquium Upcoming 05-05-2025 Active Perception, Manipulation, and Personalized Navigation for Advanced Service Robots Service robots acting in human environments must actively perceive their environment, act foresightedly, and adapt to individual user preferences. In this talk, I will first present methods to enable robots to efficiently perceive the environment and carefully manipulate objects in cluttered scenes. In particular, I will introduce an active mapping approach for confined spaces such as household shelves or horticultural crop rows, where significant occlusions pose challenges for service robots. In these scenarios, robots need to manipulate objects to reduce occlusions and improve visibility.... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker

Outreach 03-04-2025 - 19-03-2025 Girls' Day Interessante Einblicke in Forschung und Technik Linda Behringer Barbara Kettemann

Social Foundations of Computation Talk 03-04-2025 Predictive vs causal targeting of social interventions Moritz Hardt

Haptic Intelligence IS Colloquium 26-03-2025 Dexterity and Haptics at the Manipulation and Touch Lab The Manipulation and Touch Lab (MTL) at Imperial College London conducts research on topics related to human and robotic manipulation, tactile sensing, haptic interfaces and applied machine learning. In this talk the PI of the lab, Dr Ad Spiers, (formerly of MPI-IS) will discuss several of the MTL’s novel mechatronic approaches to these topics, focusing particularly on dexterous robotic manipulation and tactile sensors. Ad will also give an overview of his startup’s work on a novel haptic interface to aid navigation for vision-impaired pedestrians. Katherine J. Kuchenbecker

Social Foundations of Computation Talk 24-03-2025 Optimization of Scoring Rules Moritz Hardt

Symposium 25-02-2025 2025 Scientific Symposium All current and former employees and partners of the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems are welcome to attend this event. If you have any questions, please contact Eva Lämmerhirt, Institute Management Officer, at eva.laemmerhirt@tuebingen.mpg.de Katherine J. Kuchenbecker Eva Laemmerhirt

Social Foundations of Computation Talk 11-02-2025 - 11-03-2025 Counterfactual Token Generation in Large Language Models Moritz Hardt

Haptic Intelligence PhD Thesis Defense 17-12-2024 Precision Haptics in Gait Retraining for Knee Osteoarthritis Gait retraining, or teaching patients to walk in ways that reduce joint loading, shows promise as a conservative intervention for knee osteoarthritis. However, its use in clinical settings remains limited by challenges in prescribing optimal gait patterns and delivering precise, real-time biofeedback. This thesis presents four interconnected studies that aim to address these barriers to clinical adoption: First, a regression model was developed to predict patient-specific biomechanical responses to a gait modification using only simple clinical measures, reducing the need for instrumented g... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker Nataliya Rokhmanova

Talk 10-12-2024 Next-Generation Biohybrids: Engineering Miniature Machines Inspired by Plant Systems Among living organisms, plants are an ideal source of inspiration for robotics and engineering due to their remarkable evolutionary adaptations to almost every habitat. When miniaturized, plant-inspired machines can navigate confined and complex unstructured surfaces. We introduce a new class of plant-inspired, microfabricated hybrid machines designed for multifunctional tasks such as in situ monitoring and targeted cargo delivery. These machines combine bioinspired design with biohybrid approaches, incorporating the morphological and biomechanical features of both terrestrial and aquatic ... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker Christoph Keplinger

Perceiving Systems Talk 28-11-2024 How to predict the inside from the outside? Segment, register, model and infer! Observing and modeling the human body has attracted scientific efforts since the very early times in history. In the recent decades, though, several imaging modalities, such as Computed Tomography scanners (CT), Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), or X-ray have provided the means to “see” inside the body. Most interestingly, there is growing evidence pointing that the shape of the surface of the human body is highly correlated with its internal properties, for example, the body composition, the size of the bones, and the amount of muscle and adipose tissue (fat). In this talk I will go over ... Marilyn Keller

Social Foundations of Computation Talk 19-11-2024 Towards Better Foundations for Foundational Models: A Cognitivist Approach to Studying Large Language Models (LLMs) Moritz Hardt

Haptic Intelligence PhD Thesis Defense 23-10-2024 Data-Driven Needle Puncture Detection for Urgent Medical Care Delivery in Space Needle decompression (ND) is a surgical procedure that treats one of the most preventable causes of trauma-related death: dangerous accumulations of air between the chest wall and the lungs. However, needle-tip overshoot of the target space can result in the inadvertent puncture of critical structures like the heart. This type of complication is fatal without urgent surgical care, which is not available in resource-poor environments like space. Since ND is done blind, operators rely on tool sensations to identify when the needle has reached its target. Needle instrumentation could enable pu... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker Rachael Lorsa

Event 17-10-2024 The Atomic Human: Understanding ourselves in the age of AI The Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems is delighted to invite you to its 2024 Max Planck Lecture in Stuttgart. Michael J. Black Valeria Rojas Barbara Kettemann

Outreach 15-10-2024 Max-Planck-Institut für Intelligente Systeme stellt Forschung im Stuttgarter Rathaus aus Im Rahmen des Wissenschaftsfestivals der Landeshauptstadt schwimmen und laufen Roboter durch die Flure. Linda Behringer Barbara Kettemann

Perceiving Systems Talk 14-10-2024 Diffusion Models for Human Motion Synthesis Character motion synthesis stands as a central challenge in computer animation and graphics. The successful adaptation of diffusion models to the field boosted synthesis quality and provided intuitive controls such as text and music. One of the earliest and most popular methods to do so is Motion Diffusion Model (MDM) [ICLR 2023]. In this talk, I will review how MDM incorporates domain know-how into the diffusion model and enables intuitive editing capabilities. Then, I will present two recent works, each suggesting a refreshing take on motion diffusion and extending its abilities to new... Omid Taheri

Perceiving Systems Talk 10-10-2024 Reconstruction and Animation of Realistic Head Avatars Digital humans, or realistic avatars, are a centerpiece of future telepresence and special effects systems, and human head modeling is one of their main components. The abovementioned applications, however, are highly demanding in terms of avatar creation speed, as well as realism, and controllability. This talk will focus on the approaches that create controllable and detailed 3D head avatars using the data from consumer-grade devices, such as smartphones, in an uncalibrated and unconstrained capture setting. We will discuss leveraging in-the-wild internet videos and synthetic data sources... Vanessa Sklyarova

Perceiving Systems Talk 26-09-2024 Collaborative Control for Geometry-Conditioned PBR Image Generation Current diffusion models only generate RGB images. If we want to make progress towards graphics-ready 3D content generation, we need a PBR foundation model, but there is not enough PBR data available to train such a model from scratch. We introduce Collaborative Control, which tightly links a new PBR diffusion model to a pre-trained RGB model. We show that this dual architecture does not risk catastrophic forgetting, outputting high-quality PBR images and generalizing well beyond the PBR training dataset. Furthermore, the frozen base model remains compatible with techniques such as IP-Adapter. Soubhik Sanyal

Talk 26-09-2024 From Experimentation to Innovation: Integration of Soft Robotics and Sensing in E-Textiles This talk explores the prototyping of e-textiles and the integration of Soft Robotics systems, grounded in experimentation within digital fabrication spaces and Open Innovation environments like Fab Labs. By leveraging CNC fabrication methods and soft material manipulation, this approach reduces barriers between high and low tech, making experimentation more accessible. It also enables the integration of pneumatic actuators, sensors, and data collection systems into e-textiles and wearable technologies. The presentation will highlight how these developments open up new possibilities for ... Paul Abel Christoph Keplinger

Perceiving Systems Talk 26-09-2024 Geometry Image Diffusion: Fast and Data-Efficient Text-to-3D with Image-Based Surface Representation In this talk, I will present Geometry Image Diffusion (GIMDiffusion), a novel method designed to generate 3D objects from text prompts efficiently. GIMDiffusion uses geometry images, a 2D representation of 3D shapes, which allows the use of existing image-based architectures instead of complex 3D-aware models. This approach reduces computational costs and simplifies the model design. By incorporating Collaborative Control, the method exploits rich priors of pretrained Text-to-Image models like Stable Diffusion, enabling strong generalization even with limited 3D training data. GIMDiffusion ... Soubhik Sanyal

Symposium 16-09-2024 - 17-09-2024 Max Planck - Amazon Science Hub 2024 Research Symposium On September 16th and 17th, 2024, the Max Planck (MPG) and Amazon Science Hub will jointly host the fall research symposium bringing together our research communities and showcasing the latest innovations and advancements. Join us for this two-day event featuring keynote and lightning talks, breakout discussions and networking. Matthias Tröndle Barbara Kettemann Nisha Tyagi

Perceiving Systems Talk 12-09-2024 Generalizable Object-aware Human Motion Synthesis Data-driven virtual 3D character animation has recently witnessed remarkable progress. The realism of virtual characters is a core contributing factor to the quality of computer animations and user experience in immersive applications like games, movies, and VR/AR. However, existing automatic approaches for 3D virtual character motion synthesis supporting scene interactions do not generalize well to new objects outside training distributions, even when trained on extensive motion capture datasets with diverse objects and annotated interactions. In this talk, I will present ROAM, an alternat... Nikos Athanasiou

Haptic Intelligence Talk 05-09-2024 Towards Tendon-Actuated Prostheses with Integrated Haptic Feedback Individuals with limb loss often choose prosthetic devices to complete activities of daily living (ADLs) as they can provide enhanced dexterity and customizable utility. Despite these benefits, high abandonment rates persist due to uncomfortable, cumbersome, and unreliable designs. Despite restoring motor function, dexterous sensorimotor control remains severely impaired due to the absence of haptic feedback. This presentation details the design and evaluation of tendon-actuated mock prostheses with integrated state-based haptic feedback and their anthropomorphic tendon-actuated end effect... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker Uli Bartels

Social Foundations of Computation Talk 27-08-2024 AI as a resource: strategy, uncertainty, and societal welfare Ana-Andreea Stoica

Perceiving Systems Talk 22-08-2024 Real Virtual Humans With the explosive growth of available training data, 3D human pose and shape estimation is ahead of a transition to a data-centric paradigm. To leverage data scale, we need flexible models trainable from heterogeneous data sources. To this end, our latest work, Neural Localizer Fields, seamlessly unifies different human pose and shape-related tasks and datasets though the ability - both at training and test time - to query any arbitrary point of the human volume, and obtain its estimated location in 3D, based on a single RGB image. We achieve this by learning a continuous neural field of b... Marilyn Keller

Robotic Materials Talk 22-08-2024 Technologies of Thin Films for High-power Laser Systems High-power laser systems significantly influence solutions for major scientific issues and high-tech industries. Thin films are one of the core components of advanced high-power laser systems. With the development of output power and application scenarios, high-power laser systems have to satisfy increasingly stringent requirements on the damage threshold, optical loss, and capabilities of optical field control for thin-film components of laser systems. In terms of improving the laser damage threshold, we revealed a physical mechanism of "localized strong point", which will induce laser d... Christoph Keplinger

Haptic Intelligence PhD Thesis Defense 05-08-2024 Engineering and Evaluating Naturalistic Vibrotactile Feedback for Telerobotic Assembly Teleoperation allows workers on a construction site to assemble pre-fabricated building components by controlling powerful machines from a safe distance. However, teleoperation's primary reliance on visual feedback limits the operator's efficiency in situations with stiff contact or poor visibility, compromising their situational awareness and thus increasing the difficulty of the task. To bridge this gap, we created AiroTouch, a naturalistic vibrotactile feedback system tailored for use on construction sites but suitable for many other applications of telerobotics. Then we evaluate AiroTou... Yijie Gong Katherine J. Kuchenbecker

Perceiving Systems Talk 25-07-2024 4D Dynamic Scene Reconstruction, Editing, and Generation. People live in a 4D dynamic moving world. While videos serve as the most convenient medium to capture this dynamic world, they lack the capability to present the 4D nature of our world. Therefore, 4D video reconstruction, free-viewpoint rendering, and high-quality editing and generation offer innovative opportunities for content creation, virtual reality, telepresence, and robotics. Although promising, they also pose significant challenges in terms of efficiency, 4D motion and dynamics, temporal and subject consistency, and text-3D/video alignment. In light of these challenges, this talk wi... Omid Taheri

Perceiving Systems Talk 23-07-2024 Multimodal Social Signal Processing for Human-Robot Interaction Science fiction has long promised us interfaces and robots that interact with us as smoothly as humans do - Rosie the Robot from The Jetsons, C-3PO from Star Wars, and Samantha from Her. Today, interactive robots and voice user interfaces are moving us closer to effortless, human-like interactions in the real world. In this talk, I will discuss the opportunities and challenges in finely analyzing, detecting and generating non-verbal communication in context, including gestures, gaze, auditory signals, and facial expressions. Specifically, I will discuss how we might allow robots and virtual... Yao Feng Michael Black

Perceiving Systems Talk 18-07-2024 Integrating AI Agents into Human Lives via a Simulation Approach As the rapid growth of AI techniques, we might witness the emergence of AI agents entering our lives, reminiscent of new species. Ensuring these AI agents can well integrate into human life would be a profounding challenge. We urge these agents to be highly performant, safe, and well-aligned with human values. However, directly training and testing AI agents in real-world environments to guarantee their performance and safety is costly and can disrupt everyday life. Thus, we are exploring a simulation-based approach to incubate these AI agents. In this talk, we will highlight the role of si... Yao Feng

Perceiving Systems Talk 18-07-2024 Recreating Real Garments in Virtual Space with Gaussian Splatting and GNNs Recent advances in scene reconstruction with 3D Gaussian Splatting and cloth simulation with Graph neural networks open the prospects for methods that reconstruct proto-realistic virtual garments from visual observations. In this talk we will present our recently submitted paper – Gaussian Garments. There we reconstruct simulation ready photorealistic garments from multi-view videos. With the power of 3D Gaussian Splatting we are able to match three key aspects of real garments in virtual space: their geometry, appearance and behavior. The resulting virtual garments can then be combined int... Artur Grigorev

Social Foundations of Computation Talk 16-07-2024 Towards Scalable Information Elicitation for Oversight in Human-AI Systems Moritz Hardt

Perceiving Systems Talk 08-07-2024 Creating High-End Visuals with Real-Time Technology Creating captivating 3D visuals, particularly photorealistic CGI, demands a diverse range of tools, techniques, and expertise, from concept design to the creation of entire 3D worlds. Linear content generation represents the highest standard of visual quality and has long been a source of inspiration for game developers. In this talk, we will explore the advancements in techniques that have contributed to the rise of real-time technologies in movies and game cinematics. We will delve into projects created with Unreal Engine, such as The Matrix Awakens, Vaulted Halls Entombed (Netflix S... Yao Feng

Event 05-07-2024 2024 Intelligent Systems Summer Colloquium & Summer Party The Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems is delighted to invite you to its <br> annual scientific summer event & alumni meeting Christoph Keplinger Matthias Tröndle Barbara Kettemann Nisha Tyagi

Perceiving Systems Talk 04-07-2024 Text-Driven 3D Modeling of Avatars Generating 3D objects poses notable challenges due to the limited availability of annotated 3D datasets, unlike their 2D counterparts. Current approaches often resort to models trained on 2D data, resulting in prolonged optimization phases. Conversely, models trained on 3D datasets enable inference without optimization but suffer from limited dataset diversity. This talk explores methodologies for generative 3D modelling of human heads and garments, pivotal for human avatar creation. First, we introduce "Clip-Head," a text-to-textured 3D head generation model that generates a textured NPHM ... Victoria Fernandez Abrevaya

Social Foundations of Computation Talk 24-06-2024 The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Distributional Reinforcement Learning Moritz Hardt

Talk 14-06-2024 Soft Materials and Electronics: Novel Designs and Applications Soft materials assemblies offer a diverse range of sophisticated functions, including sensing and actuation, particularly relevant in intimate interactions with the human body. While hard materials dominate current machine and robot construction, there is a growing recognition of the advantages of soft materials in biomedical devices and human-machine interfaces. Soft systems offer comfort, safety, adaptability, and cost-effectiveness. However, the development of soft devices, encompassing sensors, actuators, and power sources, is in its early stages, requiring further research in materials... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker Christoph Keplinger

Perceiving Systems Talk 10-06-2024 Towards Human-Centric Foundation Models: Pretraining Datasets and Unified Architectures Recent years have witnessed great research interests in Human-Centric Visual Computing, such as person re-identification in social surveillance, mesh recovery in Metaverse, and pedestrian detection in autonomous driving. The recent development of large model offers the opportunity to unify these human-centric tasks and achieve improved performance by merging public datasets from different tasks. This talk will present our recent work on developing human-centric unified models on 2D vision, 3D vision, Skelton-based and vision-language tasks. We hope our model will be integrated to the curre... Yandong Wen

Talk 07-05-2024 Computational Mechanics for Plant-Inspired Soft Robots Soft robotics, an emerging field, focuses on creating flexible and adaptable robots inspired by the pliability found in living organisms. Developed through advancements in materials and manufacturing techniques, soft robots offer unique capabilities such as delicate object manipulation and safe human interaction. In soft robot design, the greatest challenge currently lies in identifying a structure capable of executing a targeted maneuver considering its intricate mechanical behavior. A possible design concept is to learn from biological systems and transfer the functionalities to biomime... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker Christoph Keplinger

Perceiving Systems Talk 02-05-2024 Generative Rendering and Beyond Traditional 3D content creation tools empower users to bring their imagination to life by giving them direct control over a scene's geometry, appearance, motion, and camera path. Creating computer-generated videos, however, is a tedious manual process, which can be automated by emerging text-to-video diffusion models (SORA). Despite great promise, video diffusion models are difficult to control, hindering users from applying their own creativity rather than amplifying it. In this talk, we present a novel approach called Generative Rendering that combines the controllability of dynamic 3D me... Shrisha Bharadwaj Michael Black

Outreach 25-04-2024 Girls Day at Tübingen MPI-IS Labs instead of schools! Claudia Daefler Nisha Tyagi

Outreach 20-04-2024 Open House Stuttgart 2024 We warmly invite you to the 2024 Open Day on April 20, 2024 from 10 am to 4 pm. This day is jointly hosted by the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems and the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research on our Stuttgart campus in Büsnau. We are excited to have you visit so you can experience the miraculous power of science up close! Barbara Kettemann Linda Behringer Claudia Daefler

Event 11-04-2024 From Idea to Impact - Unlock Your Entrepreneurial Potential (Tübingen) Explore the opportunities to transform your research into a business with our comprehensive incubation. Nisha Tyagi

Event 10-04-2024 From Idea to Impact - Unlock Your Entrepreneurial Potential (Stuttgart) Explore the opportunities to transform your research into a business with our comprehensive incubation. Claudia Daefler

Perceiving Systems Talk 04-04-2024 Modeling and Reconstructing Garments with Sewing Patterns The problems of creating new garments (modeling) or reproducing the existing ones (reconstruction) appear in various fields: from fashion production to digital human modeling for the metaverse. The talk introduces approaches to a novel garment creation paradigm: programming-based parametric sewing pattern construction and its application to generating rich synthetic datasets of garments with sewing patterns. We will then discuss how the availability of ground truth sewing patterns allows posing the learning-based garment reconstruction problem as a sewing pattern recovery. Such reformulatio... Yao Feng Michael Black

Event 22-03-2024 Women in Science We would like to cordially invite you all to a scientific talk and discussion on women in science with Ashley Bourke and Teresa Spanò, two of the authors of the article "A European Perspective on Structural Barriers to Women’s Career Progression in Neuroscience", which was recently published in Nature Neuroscience. Alona Shagan Daniela Macari Carolin Lewis

Robotic Materials Talk 18-03-2024 Bioadhesive Technologies with Mechanical Principles Bioadhesive technologies are important in a wide range of applications, spanning from wound management to wearable technologies. Forming and controlling tough adhesion on biological tissues has been a long-lasting challenge, necessitating transdisciplinary approaches. In my talk, I will share our recent progress in the design, mechanics, and applications of tough bioadhesives. I will first discuss the limitations of clinically used surgical glues and blood clots in terms of adhesion properties. I will then present the mechanical principles for making tough bioadhesives that exhibit superior... Christoph Keplinger Adrian Koh

Haptic Intelligence IS Colloquium 18-03-2024 Designing Mobile Robots for Physical Interaction with Sandy Terrains One day, robots will widely support exploration and development of unstructured natural environments. Much of the work I will present in this lecture is supported by NASA and is focused on robot design research relevant to accessing the surfaces of the Moon or Mars. Tensile elements appear repeatedly across the wide array of missions envisioned to support human or robotic exploration and habitation of the Moon. With a single secured tether either rovers or astronauts, or both, could belay down into steep lunar craters for the exploration of permanently shadowed regions; the tether prevents ... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker

Perceiving Systems Talk 13-03-2024 Geometric Regularizations for 3D Shape Generation Generative models, which map a latent parameter space to instances in an ambient space, enjoy various applications in 3D Vision and related domains. A standard scheme of these models is probabilistic, which aligns the induced ambient distribution of a generative model from a prior distribution of the latent space with the empirical ambient distribution of training instances. While this paradigm has proven to be quite successful on images, its current applications in 3D generation encounter fundamental challenges in the limited training data and generalization behavior. The key difference be... Yuliang Xiu

Symposium 27-02-2024 Scientific Symposium 2024 All current and former employees and partners of the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems are welcome to attend this event. If you have any questions, please contact Eva Lämmerhirt, Institute Management Officer, at eva.laemmerhirt@tuebingen.mpg.de Katherine J. Kuchenbecker Christoph Keplinger Matthias Tröndle Eva Laemmerhirt

Haptic Intelligence PhD Thesis Defense 23-02-2024 Creating a Haptic Empathetic Robot Animal That Feels Touch and Emotion Social touch, such as a hug or a poke on the shoulder, is an essential aspect of everyday interaction. Humans use social touch to gain attention, communicate needs, express emotions, and build social bonds. Despite its importance, touch sensing is very limited in most commercially available robots. By endowing robots with social-touch perception, one can unlock a myriad of new interaction possibilities. In this talk, I will present my work on creating a Haptic Empathetic Robot Animal (HERA), a koala-like robot for children with autism. I will demonstrate the importance of establishing desig... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker Rachael Burns

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