ECCV 2026 Workshop · Full-day · In-person

Physical AI:
Understanding and Building the
Physical World

The 1st Workshop on Physical AI brings together researchers across vision, graphics, robotics, and generative modeling to advance physics-grounded understanding of the real world — from physical property estimation and 3D/4D reconstruction to differentiable simulation and physically plausible generation.

Venue ECCV 2026 · Malmö, Sweden
Date September 9, 2026
Format 14 talks · panel · competition
01 · Overview

About the workshop

Physical AI seeks to endow AI systems with a deep, physics-grounded understanding of the real world. While recent advances in computer vision have enabled large-scale geometric reconstruction, multimodal reasoning, and generative modeling, most systems remain limited in modeling physical properties — mass, friction, material behavior, structural stability, deformation, and dynamic interactions.

This workshop integrates physical reasoning throughout the pipeline: physical property estimation, physics-informed 3D/4D reconstruction, differentiable simulation, physically plausible generation, and embodied interaction. Rather than treating physics as a downstream refinement, PhysAI positions it as a core inductive bias for representation learning and world modeling.

The workshop fosters interdisciplinary discussion across vision, graphics, robotics, and digital twinning, and is built around 14 invited talks, a panel discussion, and a competition on dynamic 4D reconstruction.

02 · Scope

Topics of interest

01

Physical scene understanding

Physical attribute estimation and reasoning — materials, mass, friction, affordances.

02

Physics-aware 3D/4D reconstruction

Reconstruction from sparse or unconstrained inputs that respects physical priors.

03

Generative world models & world simulators

Generative models and world simulators for physically consistent world modeling — a key recent goal of physical-world AI.

04

Spatial & physical reasoning

Reasoning from images, videos, and multi-modal data about physical behavior.

05

Embodied AI & robot learning

Robot learning in physics-grounded virtual environments and digital twins.

06

Benchmarks & datasets

New benchmarks and datasets for physical scene understanding and reconstruction.

03 · Invited speakers

Confirmed & invited speakers

A line-up of leaders shaping the next generation of physics-grounded AI. Listed alphabetically.

* Speaker list is tentative; confirmations to be announced.

04 · Schedule

Tentative program

Full-day workshop · 14 invited talks · 2 coffee breaks · 45-min panel discussion · competition highlights.

Time
Session
08:50 – 09:00
Opening remarks
09:00 – 10:20
Morning Session I — Invited talks (2 × 40 min)
10:20 – 10:50
☕ Coffee break
10:50 – 12:50
Morning Session II — Invited talks (3 × 40 min)
12:50 – 14:00
🥗 Lunch break
14:00 – 15:20
Afternoon Session I — Invited talks (2 × 40 min)
15:20 – 15:50
Competition highlights — Awards & winning solutions
15:50 – 16:20
☕ Coffee break
16:20 – 18:00
Afternoon Session II — Invited talks (≈ 3 × 40 min)
18:00 – 18:45
Panel discussion — The road ahead for Physical AI
18:45 – 19:00
Closing remarks

Times are local to ECCV 2026 venue. Final program will be released closer to the event.

05 · Competition

PhysAI Dynamic 4D Reconstruction Challenge

A two-track benchmark for reconstructing the physical world in motion.

Test submission deadline August 10, 2026 · 23:59 UTC
Explore the challenge →
06 · Organizers

Organizing committee

A team spanning vision, graphics, robotics, and generative modeling — across Oxford VGG, NTU PVG, NTU MMLab, ETH Zurich, Google DeepMind, and NAVER LABS Europe.

07 · Contact

Get in touch

For questions about the workshop, the challenge, or sponsorship opportunities, please reach out:

Hosted at ECCV 2026, Malmö, Sweden
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