The thk-ai.de research cluster is proud to announce a significant milestone for one of its members. Jens Brandt, a PhD student at TH Köln and Leiden University, will present his research at the Thirty-ninth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2025) in San Diego. NeurIPS is widely recognized as one of the most prestigious and competitive conferences in the field of artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Jens, who previously completed his Master’s degree in Automation & IT at the TH Köln campus in Gummersbach, has developed a novel approach to improve the reliability of autonomous systems. His paper, titled „From Faults to Features: Pretraining to Learn Robust Representations against Sensor Failures“, addresses a critical challenge in safety-critical applications like autonomous driving: ensuring models continue to function reliably even when sensors fail.
The paper introduces a pretraining method that simulates sensor failures during the training phase. This allows machine learning models to learn how to handle missing or corrupted signals, making them significantly more robust in real-world scenarios. The team demonstrated the effectiveness of this approach not only in simulations but also on a modified Lexus LC 500, enabling stable autonomous racing even during sensor outages.
This work is a collaborative effort involving researchers from TH Köln and Toyota Gazoo Racing:
* Jens U. Brandt (TH Köln, University Leiden)
* Noah Christoph Pütz (TH Köln)
* Marcus Greiff (Toyota Gazoo Racing)
* Thomas Lew (Toyota Gazoo Racing)
* John Subosits (Toyota Gazoo Racing)
* Marc Hilbert (Toyota Gazoo Racing)
* Thomas Bartz-Beielstein (TH Köln)
This acceptance is a major success for TH Köln and highlights the high-level research being conducted within the thk-ai.de research cluster. It underscores the importance of international collaboration and the cluster’s role in fostering top-tier scientific contributions. Jens is supervised by Prof. Dr. Thomas Bartz-Beielstein (TH Köln), Prof. Dr. Thomas Bäck (University Leiden, LIACS), and Dr. Marc Hilbert (Toyota Gazoo Racing).
Links:
The paper can be found here: https://neurips.cc/virtual/2025/loc/san-diego/poster/119529