Toward Next-Gen Physical AI: Research Group at Applied Intuition

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Introduction

The mission of our research is to create cutting-edge technology enabling next-generation physical AI, with emphasis on the two most challenging applications reshaping our everyday life: end-to-end autonomous driving and robotic generalist. Supported by world-class fleets, data, infrastructure, and tools, we address research topics such as reinforcement learning, 3D vision and generation, robot learning with large-scale human and synthetic data exploited in closed loop.

This group, led by Dr. Wei Zhan, includes leading experts from top institutions and companies, recognized for their exceptional academic and industry contributions—including eight Best Paper awards at premier conferences and journals such as CVPR and ICRA. Join our group to work with a team of top researchers who each have thousands of citations across their work and many top-tier publications, including a CVPR Best Paper lead author, to advance next-generation physical AI.

Supported by World-Class Fleets, Data, Infra, and Tools

Massive data from large fleets processed by automated data engine

Significant amounts of data from large fleets, automatically processed with AI curation and auto-labeling by our data engine, enables industrial-level AI research at scale

Various fleets to test and deploy our autonomy — including cars, trucks, and offroad mining

Large fleets across various products globally to test and deploy autonomy algorithms developed by our researchers and engineers, from autonomous cars tested in challenging urban scenarios to self-driving trucks and mining/construction vehicles for both onroad and offroad scenes.

Robot fleet and human data collection

Robot fleets with humanoids, mobile manipulators, and table-top dual-arm robots with cutting-edge, tactile-aware dexterous hands, as well as various human data collection devices such as MoCap, headset, and gloves.

Large-scale ML infrastructure and neural simulation with efficient tools

As a world-leading tool provider for autonomous systems, our researchers are supported by various efficient tools, high-quality neural simulation and synthetic data at scale in closed loop, and ML infrastructure toward large-scale training with thousands or more of GPUs.

Research Focuses

We address the following research fields in our group to advance next-generation physical AI:

World-action foundation model pre-training

The next-generation foundation model for physical AI should be pretrained with better balanced and grounded multi-modal data from ego action to world (vision, behavior, physics) and language toward the concrete tasks. We accordingly address the following topics:
Feed-forward/generative 4D reconstruction and world foundation model for reactive generation of 4D world conditioned on ego action with high throughput
Pretraining of world-action model with grounded modalities including vision, physics, and language

Reinforcement learning and foundation model post-training

Post-training of foundation models such as world-action and vision-language-action models is highly crucial for performance improvement, safety assurance and preference alignment for physical AI applications. In view of this, we address the following research fields:
Closed-loop reinforcement-learning-based post-training of foundation models supported by high-fidelity, scalable, high-throughput simulation constructed/learned from large-scale real-world data
Self-play reinforcement learning supported by high-throughput simulation in combination with human data imitation toward robust and human-like physical AI even with low data.

Robot learning and data

Toward capable robotic generalists, physics-aware modalities become demanding and the large-scale data to enable the generalists is not as straightforward to obtain as driving applications. Therefore, we have special focus on various paradigms and methods of robot learning and data to properly scale up data from robot, human, and synthetic world with physics-aware modalities, and corresponding design methods for utilization of the data to achieve robotic generalists.

Publications and Projects

S2GO: Streaming Sparse Gaussian Occupancy Prediction

Jinhyung Park, Chensheng Peng, Yihan Hu, Wenzhao Zheng, Kris Kitani, Wei Zhan
ICLR 2026
Blog Post
arXiv Preprint
Website

SPACeR: Self-Play Anchoring with Centralized Reference Models

Wei-Jer Chang, Akshay Rangesh, Kevin Joseph, Matthew Strong, Masayoshi Tomizuka, Yihan Hu, Wei Zhan
ICLR 2026
Blog Post
arXiv Preprint
Website

RAYNOVA: Geometry-Free Auto-Regressive 4D World Modeling with Unified Spatio-Temporal Representation

Yichen Xie, Chensheng Peng, Mazen Abdelfattah, Yihan Hu, Jiezhi Yang, Eric Higgins, Ryan Brigden, Masayoshi Tomizuka, Wei Zhan
CVPR 2026
Outstanding Paper Award, RIWM Workshop @ ICCV 2025
Preprint
Website

Learning to Drive is a Free Gift: Large-Scale Label-Free Autonomy Pretraining from Unposed In-The-Wild Videos

Matthew Strong, Wei-Jer Chang, Quentin Herau, Jiezhi Yang, Yihan Hu, Chensheng Peng, Wei Zhan
CVPR 2026
Preprint
Website

NoRD: A Data-Efficient Vision-Language-Action Model that Drives without Reasoning

Ishaan Singh Rawal, Shubh Gupta, yihan hu, Wei Zhan
CVPR 2026
Preprint
Website

Open Positions

Self-Driving

Research Scientist - 3D Vision and Generation, Self-Driving
Research Scientist - Reinforcement Learning, Self-Driving
Research Engineer - 3D Vision and Generation, Self-Driving
Research Engineer - Reinforcement Learning, Self-Driving
Research Intern - 3D Vision and Generation, Self-Driving
Research Intern - Reinforcement Learning, Self-Driving

Robotics

Research Scientist - World-Action Foundation Model, Robotics
Research Scientist - Reinforcement Learning, Robotics
Research Engineer - Robot Learning
Research Engineer - Robotic Hardware, Simulation and Data
Research Intern - World-Action Foundation Model, Robotics
Research Intern - Reinforcement Learning, Robotics
Research Intern - Robotic Hardware, Simulation and Data

ML infrastructure

Research Engineer - AI/RL Infrastructure
Applied Intuition’s mission is to accelerate the world’s adoption of safe and intelligent machines.
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