Denver, Colorado • June 3-4, 2026

World Models
Meet Active Sensing
and Closed-Loop Planning

From passive generation to interactive agents that strategically decide what to sense, when to sense, and how to act.

the vision

Generative models have mastered passive generation. But real intelligence is active. It observes, plans, acts, and learns from feedback.

Active Sensing

Models that strategically choose what to observe—optimal viewpoints, sensor placement, information seeking.

Closed-Loop Planning

Continuous replanning based on new observations. Perception and action form a tight feedback loop.

Embodied Intelligence

Agents that learn through interaction. Active decision-making transforms passive models into interactive systems.

speakers

Leading voices in vision, robotics, and embodied AI

Yiannis Aloimonos

Yiannis Aloimonos

University of Maryland

Chelsea Finn

Chelsea Finn

Stanford University

C. Karen Liu

C. Karen Liu

Stanford University

Jitendra Malik

Jitendra Malik

UC Berkeley

Nicholas Roy

Nicholas Roy

MIT CSAIL

* listed alphabetically by last name

half-day workshop • 8am–12pm

08:00

Opening Welcome & Introductions

10 min

08:10

Invited Talk: Speaker 1

30 min

08:45

Invited Talk: Speaker 2

30 min

09:20

☕ Coffee Break

15 min

09:35

Invited Talk: Speaker 3

30 min

10:10

Invited Talk: Speaker 4

30 min

10:45

Invited Talk: Speaker 5

30 min

11:20

Panel Discussion

Ranjay Krishna (UW & AI2), Amir Bar (Meta), Yilun Du (Harvard)

12:00

Closing Remarks

submit your work

Call for Papers

Submit 4-page short or 8-page long papers on world models, active sensing, embodied planning, and related topics. Non-archival, so work in progress is welcome.

Deadline: March 27, 2026
Notifications: April 15, 2026

submit a paper

Challenge

Benchmark your world models on active embodied tasks. Four tracks: Active Recognition, Embodied QA, Image-Goal Navigation, Robotic Manipulation.

Deadline: May 28, 2026
Awards: Compute credits, best paper prizes

challenge (TBD)

Try our benchmark

world-in-world

ICLR 2026 Oral

organizers

listed alphabetically by last name

Rama Chellappa

JHU

Jieneng Chen

JHU

Contact Person

Yilun Du

Harvard

Sanjeev Khudanpur

JHU

Cheng Peng

University of Virginia

Tianmin Shu

JHU

Chen Wei

Rice University

Jianwen Xie

Lambda

Alan Yuille

JHU

get in touch

Questions about the workshop, submissions, or anything else? Reach out to our contact person.

Jieneng Chen • jchen293@jh.edu