NVIDIA · PAIS

Physical AI Systems Research

Developing the learning, data, evaluation, and reasoning foundations for autonomous driving and broader Physical AI systems.

Team Lead: Jose M. Alvarez

News

NeurIPS 2026 Challenge
Hosted at the World Models in Physical AI Workshop · Sydney, Dec 2026

AV Causal Reasoning Retrieval Challenge

A challenge on causal reasoning and scenario retrieval for autonomous driving. Task, data, and baselines are available on the challenge page; winners will be announced during the workshop.

July 2026 · arXiv

Video Understanding using Atomic Propositions

From Modalities to Propositions: A Language-Centric Framework for Multimodal Intelligence. Image, video, and text are represented as bags of atomic propositions for interpretable reasoning, retrieval, and data curation.

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Sept 2026 · arXiv

Causal Dataset for Driving

CASCADE: A Spatio-Temporal-Causal Reasoning Representation and Dataset for Driving. 2,066 human-annotated driving clips with 34K+ elements for machine-verifiable reasoning.

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NeurIPS 2026

LDiP: Large Discrete Policy

Advancing Explicit Behavior Modeling with Stochastic Iterative Scoring for end-to-end driving.

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2026

Synthetic Data Generation (SDG)

World models and synthetic data generation to scale training and evaluation for autonomous driving and Physical AI.

Projects, Code & Datasets

NeurIPS 2026

LDiP: Large Discrete Policy

Explicit behavior modeling with stochastic iterative scoring for end-to-end driving.

2026

CASCADE

Spatio-temporal-causal reasoning representation and human-annotated dataset for driving.

ECCV 2026

HAD

Hierarchical diffusion combined with metric-decoupled reinforcement learning for end-to-end driving.

ECCV 2026

ZTRS

Zero-imitation end-to-end driving with a trajectory scorer trained without human demonstrations.

2026

DriveJudge

Rethinking autonomous driving evaluation with vision-language models, aligned with human judgment.

2026

TTCov: Test-Time Coverage

Test-conditioned data curation that matches training data coverage to the target deployment.

CVPR 2026

MOSAIC: Scaling-Aware Data Selection

Selects end-to-end driving training data with per-domain scaling laws, matching baselines with up to 80% less data.

CVPR 2026

GACD: Mitigating Multimodal Hallucinations

Gradient-based self-reflection at inference time to suppress spurious visual cues and reduce hallucinations.

ICML 2026 · Position

Stop Reactively Patching Your Model Every Time

A proactive flywheel that uses a structured test space to fix broad weaknesses before failures occur.

ICLR 2026

ChronoEdit

Image editing reframed as video generation, with temporal reasoning for physically plausible edits.

ICRA 2026

DriveCritic

Context-aware, human-aligned evaluation of autonomous driving with vision-language models.

WACV 2026

GHOST

Multi-round consistency benchmark for object, attribute and relation hallucinations in multimodal LLMs.

AAAI 2026

DriveSuprim

Coarse-to-fine trajectory selection for precise end-to-end planning.

IROS 2025

SafeHydra: Collision Scenario Integration

Generates collision scenarios and integrates them into planner training to improve safety in collision-prone cases.

2025 · Overview

POLARIS: Exploring the Next Generation of Data

Overview of the team's data-centric work with foundation models: data selection, VLM reliability, safety data and OmniDrive.

NeurIPS 2024 Spotlight

Memorize What Matters (3DGM)

Camera-only 3D Gaussian mapping that separates the permanent scene from passing objects across repeated drives.

ICCV 2023

Viewpoint Robustness in BEV Segmentation

Novel view synthesis to adapt bird's-eye-view segmentation to new camera rigs without new data collection.

NeurIPS 2022

HALP: Latency-Saliency Knapsack

Hardware-aware structural pruning under a global latency budget.

NeurIPS 2022

Learn-Optimize-Collect

Optimizing data collection to meet performance targets at minimum expected cost.

CVPR 2022

How Much More Data Do I Need?

Estimating data requirements for downstream tasks to reduce data-acquisition costs.

Alumni

Former Interns

Careers

Current openings on the PAIS team. New positions will be listed here as they open.

Full time Opening
Santa Clara, CA, US

Senior Research Scientist – Generative World Models for Autonomous Driving and Physical AI

Research, prototype, and develop synthetic data, generative world models, and simulation techniques to improve the training, evaluation, generalization, and safety of next-generation autonomous driving systems.