Robotics & World Models Reading Club 06: Evolution of Video World Models for Robotics — San Francisco
Robotics & World Models Reading Club 06: Evolution of Video World Models for Robotics — San Francisco
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, NVIDIA, Stanford, UC Berkeley, CMU, Dyna, ByteDance, Tesla, and leading Bay Area robotics startups.
Hosted by Junfan Zhu & Aurora Feng.
Supported by Neural Motion, a universal cross-embodiment data representation layer for embodied AI.
Reading Club 06's Core Theme
Evolution of Video World Models for Robotics
Following the recent surge in world modeling for robotics, this session analyzes the two major frameworks grounding video models in robot control: their use as learned simulators and their integration as direct decision-making policies. We will discuss the trade-offs of these approaches, focusing on the challenge of grounding digital predictions in physical reality. Central to this discussion is a case study of the Direct Video-Action (DVA) model, which enables reliable robot control by reducing control to a problem of real-time video generation.
Pre-Readings
Causal Video Models Are Data-Efficient Robot Policy Learners (2026)
DreamGen: Unlocking Generalization in Robot Learning through Video World Models (2025)
V-JEPA 2: Self-Supervised Video Models Enable Understanding, Prediction and Planning (2025)
Evaluating Gemini Robotics Policies in a Veo World Simulator (2025)
DreamZero: World Action Models are Zero-shot Policies (2026)
Video Prediction Policy: A Generalist Robot Policy with Predictive Visual Representations (2024)
Learning Universal Policies via Text-Guided Video Generation (2023)
Location
San Francisco (Downtown)
Date & Time
Saturday, May 2, 2026 | 2:00 PM – 5:00 PM
Join Discord Community
https://discord.gg/WH7DrTHRXK
Follow Saturday Robotics on X
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 – 3:00 PM Keynote by Tongzhou Mu (Rhoda AI)
Online access via Zoom: TBD
YouTube Recording: TBD (We are looking for recording volunteers)
3:00 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-03-0411
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
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
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.