Frank Röder – Research Associate & Ph.D. Candidate
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Frank Röder I am a member of the Institute for Data Science Foundations at the Hamburg University of Technology, where I research topics of sequential decision-making, world modeling and causality. I am currently wrapping up my PhD in Computer Science, awaiting the defense. My PhD mainly focused on reinforcement learning and language grounding in robotics under the supervision of Dr. Manfred Eppe (2021-2025) and Prof. Stefan Wermter (2021-2022). Currently I am working under the supervision of Prof. Nihat Ay on topics of embodied intelligence. In addition to that, I am teaching mathematics, machine learning, and reinforcement learning. If you are looking for thesis supervision, please consider applying via our institute homepage. Contact: frank.roeder [at] tuhh.de |
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Dynamics-Aligned Latent Imagination in Contextual World Models for Zero-Shot Generalization
Frank Röder, Jan Benad, Manfred Eppe, Pradeep Kr. Banerjee Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2025 [OpenReview, ArXiv, Code] We show that dynamics-aligned representations improve zero-shot generalization for contextual world models. DALI integrates within the Dreamer architecture to infer latent context representations from interactions, enabling adaptation to unseen environmental conditions without costly retraining. |
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Meta-World+: An Improved, Standardized, RL Benchmark
Reginald McLean, Evangelos Chatzaroulas, Luc McCutcheon, Frank Röder, Tianhe Yu, Zhanpeng He, K.R. Zentner, Ryan Julian, J K Terry, Isaac Woungang, Nariman Farsad, Pablo Samuel Castro Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2025; also International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) 2025 Workshop Track CODEML (Spotlight) [OpenReview, ArXiv, Code] An improved and standardized reinforcement learning benchmark suite for fair evaluation and comparison of multi-task and meta RL algorithms. |
- 04/2022 - Present: Ph.D. Student at the Institute for Data Science Foundations, Hamburg University of Technology.
- 01/2021 - 03/2022: Ph.D. Student at the Knowledge Technology Group, University of Hamburg.
- 10/2019 - 09/2020: Student Assistant at the Department of Neurology, University Medical Centre Hamburg-Eppendorf.
- Lecturer, Machine Learning II (WS 2025/26), Institute for Data Science Foundations
- Lecturer, Reinforcement Learning (WS 2025/26), Institute for Data Science Foundations
- Tutor, Mathematics II (SS 2025), Institute for Mathematics
- Tutor, Mathematics I (WS 2024/25), Institute for Mathematics
- Tutor, Introduction to Reinforcement Learning Seminar (SS 2024), Institute for Data Science Foundations
- Tutor, Introduction to Reinforcement Learning Seminar (SS 2023), Institute for Data Science Foundations
- Supervisor, Neural Networks Seminar (SS 2022), Knowledge Technology Group
- Supervisor, Bio-Inspired Artificial Intelligence Seminar (WS 2021/22), Knowledge Technology Group
- Supervisor, Neural Networks Seminar (SS 2021), Knowledge Technology Group
- Supervisor, Bio-Inspired Artificial Intelligence Seminar (WS 2020/21), Knowledge Technology Group
- September 2025: Attending NeurIPS 2025 in San Diego, CA, with two accepted papers.
- September 2025: Attending the Conference on Mathematics of Machine Learning 2025 at our institute in Hamburg.
- February 2025: Attending the Guided Self-Organization Conference (GSO-2025) in Tübingen.
- February 2025: Submitted my PhD dissertation.
- 05/2018 - 08/2019: Business Intelligence / Developer at Peaks & Pies
- 07/2017 - 04/2018: Fullstack Software Developer at Bellmorgen Vorsorge GmbH
- 04/2017 - 07/2017: Software Developer at the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Privatpatienten