Hi, I’m Marcus.

I am a PhD student at the Applied Technical-Cognitive Systems group at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, where I am supervised by Prof. Dr.-Ing. Johann Marius Zöllner.

My research focuses on learning robot policies from large-scale, unlabeled video. Prevailing approaches rely on carefully curated, action-labeled demonstrations, which are costly to obtain and limited in behavioral diversity. I investigate how transferable action representations can instead be extracted from the abundance of human-activity video available on the web, such as footage of people cooking, assembling, repairing, and otherwise interacting with the physical world, so that agents can acquire generalizable skills without bespoke dataset construction for every downstream task. I am particularly interested in vision-language-action models, world models, and how imitation learning and reinforcement learning can be efficiently utilized to ground such representations in robust, executable behavior.

Before my PhD I finished my M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering and Information Technology, also at KIT. Outside of research, I’m into sim racing, motorsports, and all action-packed things.