Oumayma Bounou

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I’m a postdoctoral researcher at NYU, where I am working with Yann LeCun on world models. Before that, I completed my PhD in the WILLOW project-team which is a joint team between Inria Paris, the Department of Computer Science of Ecole Normale Supérieure, and CNRS, where I was advised by Justin Carpentier and Jean Ponce.
Prior to that, I received an engineering degree from Télécom Paris.

My research interests lie in world models, control and optimization.

news

Jul 2026 I was in Seoul for the Global AI Frontier Lab workshop and ICML!
May 2026 I was Gold Reviewer for ICML 2026!
Apr 2026 Our work on temporal straightening for latent space planning was accepted to ICML 2026!
Feb 2026 I attended the World Modeling Workshop in Montréal!
Jan 2025 I joined Yann LeCun’s group at NYU as a postdoc!
Dec 2024 I was in Milan to present our work on learning system dynamics under optimal control guidance at CDC 2024.
Oct 2024 I successfully defended my PhD!
Dec 2023 I was in Singapore to visit Eureka Robotics and to present our work on differentiating optimal control solvers at CDC 2023.
Jul 2023 Our work on differentiating optimal control solvers was accepted to CDC 2023!
Jun 2022 I visited Jean Ponce at the CDS and Ludovic Righetti at the Machines in Motion lab at NYU Tandon.
Sep 2021 Our work on learning representations from videos for control was accepted to NeurIPS 2021!
Oct 2020 I started my PhD in the WILLOW team!

selected publications

  1. Preserving Unstable Modes Through Inverse Dynamics in JEPA World Models
    Preserving Unstable Modes Through Inverse Dynamics in JEPA World Models
    Leonardo F Toso, Yann LeCun, James Anderson, and Oumayma Bounou
    Preprint 2026
    Paper Code Website
  2. AdaJEPA: An Adaptive Latent World Model
    AdaJEPA: An Adaptive Latent World Model
    Ying Wang, Oumayma Bounou, Yann LeCun, and Mengye Ren
    Preprint 2026
    Paper Code Website
  3. Temporal Straightening for Latent Planning
    Temporal Straightening for Latent Planning
    Ying Wang, Oumayma Bounou, Gaoyue Zhou, Randall Balestriero, Tim GJ Rudner, Yann LeCun, and Mengye Ren
    International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) 2026
    Paper Code Website
  4. Value-Guided Action Planning with JEPA World Models
    Value-Guided Action Planning with JEPA World Models
    Matthieu Destrade, Oumayma Bounou, Quentin Le Lidec, Jean Ponce, and Yann LeCun
    World Modeling Workshop 2026
    Paper
  5. Closing the Train–Test Gap in World Models for Gradient-Based Planning
    Closing the Train–Test Gap in World Models for Gradient-Based Planning
    Rohun Agrawal, Nimit Kalra, Arjun Parthasarathy, Yann LeCun, Oumayma Bounou, Pavel Izmailov, and Micah Goldblum
    Preprint 2025
    Paper
  6. Learning System Dynamics from Sensory Input under Optimal Control Principles
    Learning System Dynamics from Sensory Input under Optimal Control Principles
    Oumayma Bounou, Jean Ponce, and Justin Carpentier
    IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC) 2024
    Paper
  7. Leveraging Proximal Optimization for Differentiating Optimal Control Solvers
    Leveraging Proximal Optimization for Differentiating Optimal Control Solvers
    Oumayma Bounou, Jean Ponce, and Justin Carpentier
    IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC) 2023
    Paper
  8. Online Learning and Control of Complex Dynamical Systems from Sensory Input
    Online Learning and Control of Complex Dynamical Systems from Sensory Input
    Oumayma Bounou, Jean Ponce, and Justin Carpentier
    Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2021
    Paper

full list →