Vito Mengers

I am a doctoral researcher in the Science of Intelligence Cluster at Technische Universität Berlin, where I am part of Prof. Oliver Brock’s Robotics and Biology Laboratory. With a background in Computer Engineering, my work sits at the intersection of robotics, perception, and computational models of intelligence.

My research centers on the Active Interconnect (AICON) framework in which internal models get continuously refined based on sensory input. Initially explored for robust robotic perception, I demonstrated that the framework can also drive action selection through gradient descent. This tight coupling of perception and action lets intelligent agents both react adaptively to environmental changes and actively probe their surroundings to improve perception.

Beyond robotics, I study the AICON framework as a model for biological behavior, showing that the same architecture can capture processes such as human visual attention, human sequential problem solving, and collective behavior. The resulting systems are rich, robust, and explainable, offering insight into the interactions between recursive modules—both as computational tools and as models of cognitive mechanisms.