People

Vito Mengers

Doctoral Researcher

Computer Science
Robotics

TU Berlin

 

Email:

 

Photo: SCIoI

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Vito Mengers

Vito Mengers

Photo: SCIoI

Vito is a doctoral researcher in the Science of Intelligence Cluster at Technische Universität Berlin, working in Prof. Oliver Brock’s Robotics and Biology Laboratory. With a background in Computer Engineering (BSc and MSc, TU Berlin), his research lies at the intersection of robotics, perception, and computational models of intelligence.
His work focuses on interconnected recursive estimators, systems that continuously update internal models based on sensory input. Originally applied to robust robotic perception, Vito has shown that these estimators can also support action selection via gradient descent. This tight integration of perception and action enables agents to both respond quickly to environmental changes and actively shape their perception through behavior.
Pushing beyond robotics, Vito explores these systems as a candidate principle of intelligence. He has demonstrated their ability to model complex phenomena such as human visual attention (e.g., scanpath generation in natural videos) and collective behavior (e.g., distributed estimation or coordinated motion). These systems exhibit rich, robust, and explainable behavior, offering insight into the possible computational mechanisms underlying biological intelligence.

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6984777 Mengers 1 apa 50 date desc year 19946 https://www.scienceofintelligence.de/wp-content/plugins/zotpress/
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Mengers, V., & Brock, O. (2025). No Plan but Everything Under Control: Robustly Solving Sequential Tasks with Dynamically Composed Gradient Descent. 2025 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 90–96. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICRA55743.2025.11127552
Pfisterer, A., Li, X., Mengers, V., & Brock, O. (2025). A Helping (Human) Hand in Kinematic Structure Estimation. 2025 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 11918–11925. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICRA55743.2025.11127847
Mengers, V., Roth, N., Brock, O., Obermayer, K., & Rolfs, M. (2025). A robotics-inspired scanpath model reveals the importance of uncertainty and semantic object cues for gaze guidance in dynamic scenes. Journal of Vision, 25(2), 6. https://doi.org/10.1167/jov.25.2.6
Mengers, V., Battaje, A., & Brock, O. (2025). AICON: A Representation for Adaptive Behavior. 1st German Robotics Conference (GRC).
Mengers, V., Koenig, A., Li, X., Sieler, A., Battaje, A., & Brock, O. (2025). Stop Merging, Start Separating: Why Merging Learning and Modeling Won’t Solve Manipulation but Separating the General From the Specific Will. International Conference on Robotics & Automation (ICRA) Workshop: Learning Meets Model-Based Methods for Contact-Rich Manipulation.
Mengers, V., Raoufi, M., Brock, O., Hamann, H., & Romanczuk, P. (2024). Leveraging uncertainty in collective opinion dynamics with heterogeneity. Scientific Reports, 14(1), 27314. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-78856-8
Mengers, V., Battaje, A., Baum, M., & Brock, O. (2023). Combining Motion and Appearance for Robust Probabilistic Object Segmentation in Real Time. 2023 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 683–689. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICRA48891.2023.10160908

Best Paper Award at IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2025

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