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Westlake University’s new AI center aims to move beyond language
Launched at Westlake University’s Yungu Campus on October 31, 2026, the center will explore how AI can understand physical laws, predict changes in its surroundings and interact with the real world. Assistant professor Yu Kaicheng is the center’s director, and Jin Yaochu is its chief scientist.
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Key takeaways
- Launched at Westlake University’s Yungu Campus on October 31, 2026, the center will explore how AI can understand physical laws, predict changes in its surroundings and interact with the real world.
- Assistant professor Yu Kaicheng is the center’s director, and Jin Yaochu is its chief scientist.
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openai.comCreate a landscape editorial hero image for this Studio Global article: What is the Westlake World Model Research Center launched at Westlake University’s Yungu Campus in Hangzhou on October 31, 2026, as reported. Article summary: The Westlake World Model Research Center is a university-level interdisciplinary research platform launched at Westlake University’s Yungu Campus in Hangzhou on October 31, 2026, focused on world models and physical inte. Topic tags: general, education, general web, user generated, government. Style: premium digital editorial illustration, source-backed research mood, clean composition, high detail, modern web publication hero. Use reference image context only for broad subject, composition, and topical grounding; do not copy the exact image. Avoid: logos, brand marks, copyrighted characters, real person likenesses, fake screenshots, UI text, readable text, wat
Westlake University has launched a research center devoted to a question that goes beyond what today’s language-focused AI can do: how might a system understand what is happening in the physical world, anticipate what could happen next and choose how to act?
The Westlake World Model Research Center opened on October 31, 2026, at the university’s Yungu Campus in Hangzhou. It is a university-wide interdisciplinary platform focused on world models and physical intelligence. Yu Kaicheng, an assistant professor in Westlake’s School of Engineering, is its director; Jin Yaochu, the university’s chair professor of artificial intelligence and head of its AI department, is chief scientist. Multiple principal investigators (PIs) are expected to lead research in different areas. 3
What is a world model?
Large language models work with language. A world model, by contrast, aims to predict what state the real world may move into next. That means going beyond describing a scene: the goal is to represent how objects and surroundings relate, how conditions may change and what could follow from an action. 4
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Westlake says the center will focus on three challenges: understanding physical laws, predicting changes in the environment and making decisions through interaction. Its proposed framework brings together perception, cognition, prediction and action, with the long-term aim of helping AI understand its surroundings, reason about what may happen and act in real settings. 3
That is a research agenda, not a claim that these abilities have already been achieved in a general-purpose system. The university describes ambitions that include predicting the consequences of actions and learning from real-world feedback; the available launch materials do not establish that those goals have been fully realized. 3
Building on earlier work at Westlake
The center’s direction has roots in work already underway at the university. After joining Westlake in 2023, Yu established the Autonomous Intelligence Laboratory, or AutoLab. The team initially explored generating videos of extreme driving situations to help train autonomous-driving models. Reports say it won an autonomous-driving competition track at ECCV in 2024. 28
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By late 2024, the team had begun moving toward what it calls “concept world models.” Instead of focusing on generating realistic pixel-level images, this approach represents physical concepts in an abstract mathematical latent space. The idea is to break scenes into concepts and recombine them to reason about situations the model has not encountered in exactly the same form before. 29
That approach is consistent with the new center’s interest in physical intelligence, though the launch report does not say that every center project will follow this particular research path. Reporting has also linked Yu’s concept-world-model work to the startup Awomo, pointing to a connection between university research and commercial development. 58
Yu’s background includes a bachelor’s degree in engineering from the University of Hong Kong in 2016 and a doctorate in computer and communication sciences from EPFL in 2021. His Westlake biography lists research experience at Intel Intelligent Systems Lab, Abacus.AI and Alibaba’s DAMO Academy, and identifies his research areas as 3D vision, autonomous driving and automated machine learning. 1
What has—and hasn’t—been announced
The IT Home report names Yu and Jin and says that several PIs will take responsibility for different research areas, but it does not identify those researchers or list a detailed set of initial projects. 3 More information will be needed to understand how the center divides up its work and how it plans to assess progress.
A separate report described additional announcements at the launch event: an initial world model, a pipeline for processing more than 500,000 hours of embodied physical-world data, and a geographically distributed computing platform approaching 1,000 accelerators. 51 Those details come from a different report and should not be conflated with IT Home’s account of the center’s launch—or taken as proof that general physical intelligence has already been achieved.
For now, the center’s stated ambition is clear: bring together research on how AI perceives, predicts and acts in the physical world. How far its systems can go, and what specific projects will deliver, will become clearer as the work progresses.
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Launched at Westlake University’s Yungu Campus on October 31, 2026, the center will explore how AI can understand physical laws, predict changes in its surroundings and interact with the real world.
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Launched at Westlake University’s Yungu Campus on October 31, 2026, the center will explore how AI can understand physical laws, predict changes in its surroundings and interact with the real world. Assistant professor Yu Kaicheng is the center’s director, and Jin Yaochu is its chief scientist.