World Models (CIS 6280)
Jiatao Gu · University of Pennsylvania · Fall 2026freeSource ↗Mirror on the instructor’s site ↗Course calendar (.ics) — lecture and deadline dates ↗Lecture 3 practice · Gymnasium basic usage ↗Lecture 4 practice · dynamax Kalman-filter tracking notebook ↗Awesome World Models (Dong et al.) — the course’s own reading index ↗
Added 2026-09-12 at Connor’s direction and deliberately OFF the ladder, on the same terms as mit-multimodal-ai: learned dynamics models are not a rung on the token-to-task path, so a rung would be invented. Ungated because its stated background (CIS 5190/5200-level ML) is not a unit here. Its three assignments and final project are Canvas-only with specs posted per release — nothing cloneable exists as of 2026-09-12. What is public: six lecture decks so far (PDF + interactive), the reading list, and the two runnable notebooks the lectures point at (Gymnasium basic usage · dynamax Kalman tracking).
No weekly slot allocated (Connor, 2026-09-12).
Environment
Setup is a real gatepartial~/dev/study/penn-cis6280-world-models/
The six published lecture PDFs (L1–L6) and the .ics are downloaded under lectures/. No starter code exists to clone; practice/ is where the self-set exercises go. Nothing has been run.
Segments
The named subset — the scope above is the count| Ref | Title | Done | Artifacts | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| L1 | World models: an overview | · | NBBLDGMEBTL0/0 | |
| L2 | History, foundations and probabilistic formulation | · | NBBLDGMEBTL0/0 | |
| L3 | Environments, simulators and rollouts | · | NBBLDGMEBTL0/0 | Practice: Gymnasium reset/step/trajectory collection. |
| L4 | State-space models | · | NBBLDGMEBTL0/0 | Practice: the dynamax Kalman-filter tracking notebook. |
| L5 | Representation learning I | · | NBBLDGMEBTL0/0 | |
| L6 | Representation learning II (JEPA family) | · | NBBLDGMEBTL0/0 |
Artifacts
Consume → do → output- A one-domain world model built to the course’s own project brief, with the modelled state, transition and evaluation made explicitNot yet — nothing has landed for this slot.
Feeds
What closing this sharpensAssignments 1–3 (due Sep 24 · Oct 19 · Nov 18) and the final project (proposal Oct 14, report + code Dec 14) are enrolled-students-only and their specs are not on the public page, so the `ran it` seat can only come from the lecture-linked notebooks or a self-set world-model build in one domain, on the course’s own project brief.