FunAI

Research lab led by @y_m_asano at @utn_nuremberg. We conduct fundamental AI research and develop core technology for future Foundation Models.

[Yuki @y_m_asano]

@FunAILab with me and @dawkopi at @COLM_conf in SF! Seeing lots of cool papers already and stoked for meeting more folks from the LM side these days! Just reach out and let’s grab a coffee ✌️

[European Conference on Computer Vision #ECCV2026 @eccvconf]

It’s #ECCV2026 Main Conference Day 2!

Coming up later today: our second keynote with @ylecun, followed by the reception.

[Kosta Derpanis @CSProfKGD]

Cool #ECCV2026 talk by @gaur_manu @jonaruthardt @funailab

[Yuki @y_m_asano]

I am incredibly honoured to receive the ECVA/ @eccvconf Young Researcher Award. ✨🎉I cannot quite believe it, but what I do know is, that this is all thanks to my amazing collaborators, mentors and students and friends. Thank you! You all put the Fun in Fundamental AI. It’s an adventure to be in this field, in this time.

[European Conference on Computer Vision #ECCV2026 @eccvconf]

ECVA Young Researcher Award winners 2025-2026

[FunAI @FunAILab]

Our lab regularly hosts visiting PhD students from other labs! It's a great way to exchange insights, expand the network and build collaborations. 🎉

[Yuki @y_m_asano]

My opposing take: text will get you only so far (maybe far enough for many applications and commercial value), but learning from unlabeled data, in particular videos, will (with the right method/architecture) be the best: huge quantities, physics, geometry, occlusions etc. but: Getting there will take proper research, no winning recipe there just yet

[Ioana @ioanasimioni]

(1/n) What if you could teach a vision model about 3D structure without a single 3D label and just a tiny fraction of its pretraining compute? 👁️ That’s 3DPoV. ✨ Heading to #ICML2026 in Seoul 🇰🇷 to share it 👇

[Yuki @y_m_asano]

[PhD opening🎉] Part of the Bavarian Foundation Model initiative is to also develop and build more radical ideas (besides catching up). Within this, I'm stoked to be involved in an exciting project on tokenizer-free FoMos with @vjhofmann 👇

[Oishi Deb @DebOishi]

Happening Now! Come to VGI workshop @CVPR in Room 703 to listen to the excellent keynote speakers: Robert Geirhos @GoogleDeepMind; @AdtRaghunathan @CSDatCMU; @mattdeitke @Meta; @y_m_asano @funailab; @alexgkendall @wayve_ai; Andrea Vedaldi; Alexei Efros; Kristen Grauman @CVPRConf

[Yuki @y_m_asano]

Looking forward to speaking here at ~11:30 room 703. Spoiler slide below 👇

[FunAI @FunAILab]

Come join us!

[Yuki @y_m_asano]

🎉[openings] I’m hiring postdoctoral researchers to join our @FunAILab at UTN through the Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellowship (@AvHStiftung), via the Henriette Herz Scouting Programme.

As a Henriette Herz Scout, I can nominate outstanding international researchers for this fellowship route. I’m especially keen to hear from candidates working on multimodal learning, video and image pretraining, and post-training.

Fellows would be hosted in our lab at UTN and work closely with us on these topics.

Key requirements:
* finished your doctoral studies less than 4 years ago or will finish in the next 6 months
* did not live/work in Germany in the last 10 years
* applications from female, trans* and/or non-binary candidates are highly encouraged!

Interested? Please send a short note with your CV, PhD year, current affiliation, 2–3 key publications, and a few lines on how your work connects.

Please share! 🔀

[FunAI @FunAILab]

Sakana means fish in Japanese.

[Yuki @y_m_asano]

Today we visited Japan's hottest AI startup @SakanaAILabs🎏🇯🇵!
We met their research scientists and discussed the implications and impact of some their works like "The AI scientist" and "Continous Thought Machines".
We presented our @FunAILab works, "Better Language Models Exhibit Higher Visual Alignment" and "Data Repetition Beats Data Scaling in Long-CoT Supervised Fine-Tuning". Got lots of cool questions and discussions! Thanks, Masanori Suganuma, @_yutaroyamada, @ciaran_regan_

[FunAI @FunAILab]

@gatheluck @noagarciad

[FunAI @FunAILab]

Today we had a joint workshop!
We got to know each other's research directions and make some personal connections!

@AIST_EN, @TUS_PR_en, @FragileGoodwill, @noagarciad

[FunAI @FunAILab]

Start of our workshop, organised by our postdoc fellow @FragileGoodwill!
Today we'll be getting to know each other's research directions and make some personal connections!

@AIST_EN, @TUS_PR_en, and @noagarciad and more: https://t.co/yDS9DCvZth

'cc @HirokatuKataoka

[FunAI @FunAILab]

The next two weeks our lab will be in.. Japan!!

We'll visit @AIST_EN, @SakanaAILabs, @WbyT_Tech, @SonyAI_global , @jouhouken (NII), @TUS_PR_en and @RIKEN_JP.

We'll report what we learn, so come with us on this journey!

[Yuki @y_m_asano]

[new CVPR'26 paper]
🔄 SSL works great when you have tons of data.
But in 3D… we don’t.
High-quality 3D scans are expensive, slow, and hard to scale. So what if we could pretrain 3D models without any real 3D scans? 1/

[Yuki @y_m_asano]

Group picture of our @ELLISforEurope @Ellis_Amsterdam Foundation Model PhD school! 👏 🎉 @CSProfKGD @cgmsnoek @robrombach @FrankRHutter @YGandelsman @eliricci_ @nuriaoliver @sainingxie @PascalMettes, @KatiaShutova Hinrich Schütze, Robert Geirhos

[FunAI @FunAILab]

In other news: Four members of the lab just finished their first marathon in Rome!! Congratulations 🎉 💪 ☀️