Hosts: Junfan Zhu, Aurora Feng
discord.gg/WH7DrTHRXK
Robotics & World Models Reading Club 23: Engineering Robotic Simulators for Evaluation and Beyond. SF 8/15
Robotics & World Models Reading Club 23: Engineering Robotic Simulators for Evaluation and Beyond. SF 8/15
A high-signal reading group for AI researchers & builders pushing the frontiers of robotic world models, WAMs, and embodied intelligence. In our previous sessions, we brought together researchers and engineers from Boston Dynamics, Google DeepMind, NVIDIA, Stanford, UC Berkeley, Physical Intelligence, Tesla, Generalist, Rhoda AI, and leading Bay Area robotics startups.
Hosted by Junfan Zhu & Aurora Feng.
Reading Club 23's Core Theme
Engineering Robotic Simulators for Evaluation and Beyond
Keynote: Kaifeng Zhang (Columbia, World Labs)
How do you use your simulator--if at all? For evaluation, synthetic data generation, or training?
A simulator is a system designed for recreating real-world appearance and dynamics, modeling tasks that matter, and making experimentation efficient and scalable. Building a useful simulator takes more than creating eye-catchy visuals and identifying a handful of physics parameters.
In this talk, I will discuss how we can engineer simulators for different parts of the robot learning pipeline. First, for evaluation, I will present Rea2Sim-Eval, our recent work for turning real-world scenes into simulatable environments for evaluating policies. The work shows that carefully modeling both appearance and dynamics to match the real world can make simulation a much more trustworthy proxy for policy performance. To achieve this, we use modern tools from vision and graphics: visual gap is closed with Gaussian Splatting, and the dynamics gap is closed using learned digital twins. Together, they allow policies trained on real-world data to operate zero-shot in sim, achieving strong correlations even for challenging tasks involving deformable objects.
I will then discuss some ongoing efforts that move beyond evaluation towards a complete coverage of the robot learning pipeline, including data generation and training. We explore how real-to-sim can be fully automated with an agentic workflow, and how sim with calibrated physics can serve as a data engine to enable training and seamless sim-to-real transfer. Together, these efforts aim to build toward a future where simulation serves as a key component for building robot foundation models.
Pre-Readings
Location
San Francisco
Date & Time
Saturday, August 15, 2026 | 2:00 PM – 5:00 PM
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https://discord.gg/WH7DrTHRXK
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https://x.com/saturdayrobotic
Agenda
2:00 PM – 2:30 PM Door Opens & Social
Food 😋, beverages🧋 and UNLIMITED strawberries 🍓 (our official reading club fruits ☺️😄).
2:30 PM – 3:30 PM Keynote by Kaifeng Zhang (Columbia, World Labs)
YouTube Recording: TBD (We are looking for recording volunteers)
3:30 PM – 5:00 PM Q&A, open-floor roundtable (10–20 min per topic) on spotlight papers or any paper you’d like to highlight. Feel free to share why the paper matters and its technical details.
Past events
#reading-club-18-0718: Causal World Models For Real-World Intelligence. SF 07/18
Session 18 Luma: https://luma.com/f74eguvr
Reading Club 18 Review: https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2078738476602884502?s=20
Reading Club 18 Recap: https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2078747463058694625?s=20
Autonomous Panel Moderation: Rebuilding the Factory: Physical AI on the Production Line: https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2078385948887490814?s=20
#reading-club-17-0711: Soft Tactile-Centric Multimodal Intelligence Toward Safe and Dexterous Manipulation. SF 07/11
Quan Luu, Purdue.
Session 17 Luma: https://luma.com/e53zawq2
Reading Club 17 Review: https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2076205508646850819?s=20
Reading Club 17 Recap: https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2076207394426917187?s=20
#private-lunch-icml-0709: Saturday Robotics x ICML Private Lunch (Seoul)
Private Lunch: https://luma.com/khqg11gt
#reading-club-16-0704: The Embodied AI Hardware Stack — Supply Chain, Sensors, and the Data Flywheel — SF 07/04
Jerry Huang, Robotics Center of Silicon Valley.
Session 16 Luma: https://luma.com/cgzyfpeb
Reading Club 16 Review: https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2073666442512547957?s=20
Reading Club 16 Recap: https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2073667174678589620?s=20
#reading-club-15-0627: Scaling Touch: Flexible Tactile Skin for Dexterous Manipulation
Binghao Huang, Columbia, Amazon FAR.
Session 15 Luma: https://luma.com/7lts5ppf
Reading Club 15 Review: https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2071129728984273105?s=20
Reading Club 15 Recap: https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2071132114226139489?s=20
#deep-tech-week-14-0625: Deep Tech Week Research Night
SPEAR: A Simulator for Photorealistic Embodied AI Research. (ECCV 2026 accepted) by Mike Roberts, Senior Research Scientist, Adobe Research.
Bogdan Cristei, Venture Partner at SHACK15 Ventures.
Simone Totaro, CTO at Saturn Dynamics.
Shumo Chu, CEO at General Intelligence Labs.
Margaret Zhang, CEO at ThirdBrain Labs.
Session 14 Luma: https://luma.com/l1g9c2l1
Deep Tech Week 14 Review: https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2070417784560066592?s=20
Deep Tech Week 14 Recap: https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2070420270964514923?s=20
#reading-club-13-0620: HumanEgo: Train Robot Policy from 30 min Egocentric Videos — SF 0620
Session 13 Luma: https://luma.com/6vkhxnum
Reading Club 13 Review 1: HumanEgo: Zero-Shot Robot Learning, Human Egocentric Video, Leo Wang, Amazon FAR & UMaryland https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2068603103138713824?s=20
Reading Club 13 Recap 1: https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2068605511549743127?s=20
Reading Club 13 Review 2: Causal World Models: Biwei Huang, Aether AI & UCSD
Reading Club 13 Recap 2: https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2068746229643936177?s=20
#reading-club-12-0613: Origami Robotics (YC W26) on Dexterity
Session 12 Luma: https://luma.com/5w7c1t2a
Reading Club 12 Review: https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2066275974988337178?s=20
Reading Club 12 Recap: https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2066278639554245097?s=20
#cvpr-denver-11-0606: 🤖🥘 Saturday Robotics x Manycore Tech x Neural Motion | CVPR 2026 Denver Research Night | Robotics & World Models Reading Club 11
Junfan Zhu & Aurora Feng, Founders of Saturday Robotics
Anthony Zhao, Head of North America at Manycore Tech SpacialVerse
Aurora Feng, Founder at Neural Motion. NM-GenET.
Max Zhaoshuo Li, Robotics and World Model Tech Lead at NVIDIA Cosmos. Cosmos 3.
Xiaofan Li, World Model Tech Lead at X Square Robot. WALL-WM.
Zesen Zhao, University of Michigan. Test-Time Scaling for World Action Models via Zero-Shot Geometric Verification.
Pengyi Liao. VGGT-Ω: From 3D Reconstruction to Scalable Spatial Representation.
Jie Wang, University of Pennsylvania, GRASP Lab. Toward a Robotics MMLU: Lessons from Sim & Real Evaluations of Generalist Policies.
Gordon Qian, Senior AI Researcher at Snap. Diffusion-DRF: Free, Rich, and Differentiable Reward for Video Diffusion Fine-Tuning.
YouTube livestream: https://www.youtube.com/live/P_3gSC-5cYM?si=530zqf2NscCq643O
CVPR Denver Research Night Luma: https://luma.com/zamm9g2g
CVPR Denver Research Night Lightning Talks Review: https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2065102150418788581?s=20
CVPR Denver Research Night Lightning Talks Recap: https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2065104616497524843?s=20
CVPR Hot Takes Review: https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2065234892653547904?s=20
CVPR Hot Takes Recap: https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2065236892988416166?s=20
#reading-club-10-0530: Bringing Robots to Life — Learning Humanoid Instincts from the Body Up | San Francisco 0530
Haochen Shi (Stanford, co-advised by Karen Liu & Shuran Song)
Session 10 Luma: https://luma.com/czz76qe1
Reading Club 10 Recap: https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2061145697693683878?s=20
#private-dinner-01-0529: Robo Plov x Saturday Robotics
Private Dinner 01 Luma: https://luma.com/3rzqwond
Private Dinner 01 Review: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/junfan-zhu_saturday-robotics-was-excited-to-host-its-activity-7466384182190182400-Zgnv?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAABxP-p0BpUNGDf347aKh_1uJAPzG4er0As8
#reading-club-09-0523: CVPR Warm-up & Founders Spotlight — DeltaWorld + VisuoTactile Dexterous Hands
Tommie Kerssies (Amazon Frontier AI & Robotics)
Arjun Subramaniam (Factory Intelligence)
Session 09 Luma: https://luma.com/wooiz0bf
Reading Club 09 Review: Part 1: Robotics & World Model Reading Club 9.1: CVPR Warm-up— A Frame is Worth 1 Token: DeltaToken. https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2058449627184267621?s=20
Reading Club 09 Review: Part 2: Robotics & World Model Reading Club 9.2: Tactile Sensor & Reliable Manipulation in Production. https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2058461947637694948?s=20
#reading-club-08-0516: Embodied Human Data as the “Internet of Motion and Behavior”
Ryan Punamiya (NVIDIA Gear, Georgia Tech)
Session 08 Luma: https://luma.com/qoxioge7
Reading Club 08 Review: https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2055913563743830229?s=20
Reading Club 08 Recap: https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2055915875493204439?s=20
#reading-club-07-0509: Learning to Dream: World Models, Imagination, Path to Foundation Models for Control
Ahmet Şemi ASARKAYA (Agility Robotics)
Session 07 Luma: https://luma.com/srhe0vuo
Reading Club 07 Review: https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2053387034241454397?s=20
#reading-club-06-0502: Evolution of Video World Models for Robotics
Session 06 Luma: https://luma.com/sdrd4zwr
Reading Club 06 Review: https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2050834699275383008?s=20
#reading-club-05-0425: World Models for Physical Intelligence: From Predictive Brains to Embodied Robots
Daniel Dugas & Sergio Arnaud (Meta FAIR)
Session 05 Luma: https://luma.com/p7zvpyvg
Reading Club 05 Review: https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2048315020946317710?s=20
YouTube Recording: https://youtu.be/RVy6oQXNDgc?si=u2VLtCBjfdMvXaf-
#reading-club-04-0418: Abstractions of the Physical World for Decision-Making
Siming He (UC Berkeley)
Session 04 Luma: https://luma.com/atv7bm3i
Reading Club 04 Review: https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2045770010979905862
YouTube Recording: https://www.youtube.com/@saturdayrobotic
#reading-club-03-0411: Robotic Policy Adaptation
Haoyi Niu (UC Berkeley)
Session 03 Luma: https://luma.com/561xgirg
Reading Club 03 Review: https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2043243484568768519?s=20
YouTube Recording: https://www.youtube.com/@saturdayrobotic
#reading-club-02-0404: JEPA Zoo
Julian Saks (https://x.com/JulianSaks)
Session 02 Luma: https://luma.com/g3qrrti0
Reading Club 02 Review (liked by Yann LeCun on X): https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2040716119259164673?s=20
#reading-club-01-0328
Session 01 Luma: https://luma.com/8s4w1wu6
Reading Club 01 Review (liked by Yann LeCun on X): https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2038153945219305812
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Logistics
Spots are limited. Please arrive by 2:00 PM for check-in. Keynote will begin promptly at 2:30 PM.
We currently do not have volunteers available to assist with late check-ins. Given the high volume of inquiries and 100+ attendees (both online and onsite), we kindly ask that you arrive on time to ensure smooth entry.
Hosts: Junfan Zhu, Aurora Feng
discord.gg/WH7DrTHRXK