Mila World Modeling Workshop: wrap-up

The Workshop on World Modeling, co-hosted by Mila and Lambda in 2026, explored the potential of large language models equipped with sensory capabilities to perceive and understand the real world, raising questions about autonomy, safety, and the scientific breakthroughs necessary for such advancements. The event, featuring notable speakers like Yoshua Bengio, Yann LeCun, and Juergen Schmidhuber, focused on challenges including scalable architectures, multimodal integration, and the importance of high-quality data and simulation environments. Sherry Yang highlighted the need for world models to incorporate structured scientific knowledge for deeper causal understanding. The workshop featured 50 papers, with seven oral presentations, including significant contributions such as the "World Modeling using Latent Particle Models" paper from Carnegie Mellon University and Lambda, exemplifying the complexity and promise of developing AI systems capable of interacting with the real world.