Hi! I am Markus, a PhD student in Computer Science at UNSW Sydney, supervised by Francisco Cruz and Michael Thielscher . Previously, I received my Master's degree in Physics from Goethe University Frankfurt, where I worked on self-supervised learning with professor Jochen Triesch.
Research
My research lies at the intersection of cognitively inspired approaches and foundational artificial intelligence. By incorporating principles from cognitive science I aim to develop intelligent, generalist embodied systems capable of open-ended learning, with the ultimate goal of advancing artificial general intelligence.
My current focus is on Model-based Reinforcement Learning and Intrinsic Motivation. If you would like to collaborate or chat, feel free to book a meeting below or read my full research statement outlining the next years.
News
- July 2nd, 2026: RSS 2026 is coming to Sydney next week and I will be talking all things ARROW at the robot world models workshop.
- June 10th, 2026: ARROW, our new approach in model-based RL for continual learning was accepted at Transactions on Machine Learning Research with a J2C and reproducibility certification 🎉.
- May 29th, 2026: Our paper about exploration in deep reinforcement learning with infant spontaneous movement noise was accepted to ICDL 2026 🎉
- March 13th, 2026: Meet ARROW, our new model-based RL agent that uses an intelligent neuro-inspired buffer to efficiently accomplish continual learning. The preprint is now on ArXiv
- January 5th, 2026: Happy New Year 🎆 - Looking forward to announcing new and exciting deep RL projects, stay tuned.
- November 28th, 2025: I am happy to announce that I will be joining the cognitive robotics lab at UNSW Sydney as a PhD Student. I will be working on model-based RL and I am excited to embark on this fantastic journey. I am truly happy beyond words and looking forward to moving to Australia.
Selected Publications
Awards
awarded by UNSW Sydney including a full scholarship for the length of the PhD program, including living stipend and all tuition fees
awarded by Goethe-Universität Frankfurt to students with outstanding academic performance and social commitment
awarded by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) for a four-months post-graduate stay at the University of Toronto
competitively awarded to 4 students and included the waiver of tuition fees for one semester
Services
COMP9414: Artificial Intelligence, MetK: Climate Change, eMetA: Introduction to Meteorology, eMetB: Atmospheric Dynamics 1
host of a feature-length scienceslam event commemorating the 100. anniversary of Goethe University Frankfurt; winner of the 7th, and participation in the 3rd scienceslam Frankfurt am Main (1200 viewers)