Attend LIONS Seminar with guest Ali Tajer, April 3

About:

Ali Tajer is a professor of electrical, computer and systems engineering and the associate dean for academic affairs in the School of Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, or RPI. His research interests include mathematical statistics, machine learning and information theory. He is currently an associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory and a senior area editor for the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing.

Abstract:

Building reliable world models for physical systems is a central challenge in modern artificial intelligence, or AI, with broad implications for scientific discovery, robotics, autonomy and control. Unlike purely statistical prediction, world models for physical environments must capture the underlying causal structure of the system: which latent factors correspond to genuine physical mechanisms, how these factors evolve under interventions and how they govern future observations across changing environments. This motivates a fundamental question: how can an agent learn representations that are not merely predictive, but causally meaningful and therefore suitable for reasoning, planning and adaptation in the physical world?

In this talk, we will discuss causal representation learning, or CRL, as a principled foundation for building world models of physical systems. CRL aims to uncover latent variables that correspond to the system’s underlying generative factors and to organize them in a way that reflects causal relationships, invariances and intervention effects. Such representations can enable models that extrapolate more reliably beyond the training regime, support counterfactual and interventional reasoning and provide a pathway toward more interpretable and transferable decision-making. We will present our perspective on why causality is essential for world modeling, outline key challenges in learning causal latent structure from high-dimensional observations and highlight emerging directions for integrating CRL with dynamics, control and scientific machine learning.

Seminar host:

Our hosts for this LIONS Seminar are Professor Lalitha Sankar and Associate Professor Shaofeng Zou, both from the School of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering. Visit the LIONS Seminar website for more information.

LIONS Seminar
Friday, April 3, 2026
1:30–2:30 p.m.
Goldwater Center for Science and Engineering (GWC) 487, Tempe campus [map]