Vito Mengers

Vito is a doctoral researcher in the Science of Intelligence Cluster at Technische Universität Berlin, working in Prof. Oliver Brock’s Robotics and Biology Laboratory. With a background in Computer Engineering (BSc and MSc, TU Berlin), his research lies at the intersection of robotics, perception, and computational models of intelligence. His work focuses on interconnected recursive estimators, systems that continuously update internal models based on sensory input. Originally applied to robust robotic perception, Vito has shown that these estimators can also support action selection via gradient descent. This tight integration of perception and action enables agents to both respond quickly to environmental changes and actively shape their perception through behavior. Pushing beyond robotics, Vito explores these systems as a candidate principle of intelligence. He has demonstrated their ability to model complex phenomena such as human visual attention (e.g., scanpath generation in natural videos) and collective behavior (e.g., distributed estimation or coordinated motion). These systems exhibit rich, robust, and explainable behavior, offering insight into the possible computational mechanisms underlying biological intelligence.