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KE:SAI - Kyutai ELLIS Scalable Autonomous Intelligence @kesai.eu · 17/09/2026

KE:SAI is an open science lab! We talk about our research without secrets. Visit our new website to find some of our recent talks: kesai.eu/talks/

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KE:SAI - Kyutai ELLIS Scalable Autonomous Intelligence @kesai.eu · 10/09/2026

Making progress measurable in autonomous driving. Our new post traces the path from NAVSIM to the AlpaSim challenge: kesai.eu/blog/2026-09...

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KE:SAI - Kyutai ELLIS Scalable Autonomous Intelligence @kesai.eu · 10/09/2026

At Cyber Valley Day, we had the great pleasure to welcome the minister president of Baden Württemberg Cem Özdemir to our KE:SAI garage and present our mission!

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KE:SAI - Kyutai ELLIS Scalable Autonomous Intelligence @kesai.eu · 08/09/2026

KE:SAI is ready for CyberValley Day 2026! cyber-valley.de/en/events/cy...

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KE:SAI - Kyutai ELLIS Scalable Autonomous Intelligence @kesai.eu · 23/07/2026

KE:SAI is hiring! You are super excited about world models and autonomy? Come and join our team! Let's have impact together! kesai.eu/join/

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KE:SAI - Kyutai ELLIS Scalable Autonomous Intelligence @kesai.eu · 17/07/2026

It's getting real! We have been working on self-driving for more than 15 years, and most of that work has happened in simulation. Today that changes: our research vehicle arrived, and we can start testing our ideas in the physical world. kesai.eu/blog/2026-07...

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KE:SAI - Kyutai ELLIS Scalable Autonomous Intelligence @kesai.eu · 08/07/2026

Key dates: Aug 15: mid-competition checkpoint Sep 15: rules/submission format freeze Oct 31: public leaderboard closes + technical reports due Nov 15: final results + award decisions Each track awards two NVIDIA DGX Spark prizes.

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KE:SAI - Kyutai ELLIS Scalable Autonomous Intelligence @kesai.eu · 08/07/2026

Leaderboards report an ELO-style Policy Capability Score and Avg Distance Between At-Fault Incidents. Driver instances are capped at 16 GiB VRAM; policies should target <=0.1 s/model forward pass for a 10 Hz loop, replicating realistic deployment constraints.

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KE:SAI - Kyutai ELLIS Scalable Autonomous Intelligence @kesai.eu · 08/07/2026

Participants get public development data, starter tools, documentation, a submission CLI, and container requirements before organizer-side evaluation on private curated scenarios. Teams submit AlpaSim-compatible driving policies, not downloadable test-set predictions.

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KE:SAI - Kyutai ELLIS Scalable Autonomous Intelligence @kesai.eu · 08/07/2026

Two tracks: nuPlan: public-resource track for nuPlan/NAVSIM workflows; award entries may use only public datasets, annotations, and model weights. PAI-AV: larger-scale track; private resources allowed for awards with usage rights and high-level disclosure.

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KE:SAI - Kyutai ELLIS Scalable Autonomous Intelligence @kesai.eu · 08/07/2026

Why closed loop? Open-loop scores against logged trajectories miss compounding errors. In AlpaSim, submitted policies control the ego vehicle over time, so small planning mistakes can change the future scene distribution and expose failures that static prediction scores miss.

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KE:SAI - Kyutai ELLIS Scalable Autonomous Intelligence @kesai.eu · 08/07/2026

The AlpaSim E2E Closed Loop Challenge 2026 is open for registration and leaderboard access in a soft-open period. Build AV policies for realistic closed-loop simulation, where each policy's own decisions shape future scenes, observations, and interactions.

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KE:SAI - Kyutai ELLIS Scalable Autonomous Intelligence @kesai.eu · 04/07/2026

🔥 ICML 2026 paper alert! Introducing PointDiT, a radically simple diffusion transformer for 3D geometry generation that bypasses the VAE bottleneck completely. We asked: Can we make 3D reconstruction beautifully simple? Turns out: Yes! 📄 Paper + Demo: haofeixu.github.io/pointdit/

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KE:SAI - Kyutai ELLIS Scalable Autonomous Intelligence @kesai.eu · 03/07/2026

Check out the video of our approach and the leaderboard below: Video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsck... Leaderboard: kitscenes.com/benchmarks/l...

youtube.com

KITScenes LongTail 3rd Place

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KE:SAI - Kyutai ELLIS Scalable Autonomous Intelligence @kesai.eu · 03/07/2026

Our team placed 3rd in the KITScenes LongTail Challenge at the CVPR 2026 Workshop on Autonomous Driving! We used zero-shot evaluation with the NVIDIA Alpamayo 1.5 vision-language-action model, with zero fine-tuning or task-specific training.

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KE:SAI - Kyutai ELLIS Scalable Autonomous Intelligence @kesai.eu · 28/06/2026

World Engine is a RL post-training simulator for end-to-end driving. In collaboration with industry (and industry-scale data), we present an end-to-end policy post-trained within World Engine that achieves 200 km real driving without intervention. github.com/OpenDriveLab...

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KE:SAI - Kyutai ELLIS Scalable Autonomous Intelligence @kesai.eu · 27/06/2026

The unreasonable effectiveness of state-of-the-art imitation learning models in the CARLA simulator is largely explained by a hidden shortcut: the target point bias. Read more in our new blog. Link in the comments.

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KE:SAI - Kyutai ELLIS Scalable Autonomous Intelligence @kesai.eu · 24/05/2026

KE:SAI has been (briefly) featured in ZDF Länderspiegel! Watch here (starting at 17:00, in German): www.zdf.de/video/magazi...

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KE:SAI - Kyutai ELLIS Scalable Autonomous Intelligence @kesai.eu · 20/05/2026

Bill Gurley made a fantastic post on the case for open-science labs like KE:SAI. A strongly encouraged read on open source in general and for autonomous vehicles in particular! p3institute.substack.com/p/from-open-...

p3institute.substack.com

From Open Source Software to Open Source Strategy

How the Smartest Executives Are Using Open Source Techniques to Optimize Corporate Strategy

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KE:SAI - Kyutai ELLIS Scalable Autonomous Intelligence @kesai.eu · 20/05/2026

The research is led by a founding team of experts: Andreas Geiger (CEO), Kashyap Chitta (CTO), and Bernhard Schölkopf, alongside co-founders Bernhard Jaeger and Daniel Dauner.

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KE:SAI - Kyutai ELLIS Scalable Autonomous Intelligence @kesai.eu · 20/05/2026

KE:SAI has offices in Tübingen and Paris. By integrating foundational open research and the agility of modern startups, KE:SAI will develop a fully open technology stack for physical AI.

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KE:SAI - Kyutai ELLIS Scalable Autonomous Intelligence @kesai.eu · 20/05/2026

@kyutai-labs.bsky.social and @ellisinsttue.bsky.social announce the official launch of KE:SAI – Kyutai ELLIS Scalable Autonomous Intelligence. KE:SAI is a non-profit open science research lab dedicated to the next frontier of AI: systems that can understand and act in the world.

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