Westlake University launches World Model Research Center

On October 31, 2026, the Westlake Center for World Models was established at Westlake University's Yunsu campus. The center is a university-level interdisciplinary research platform created within the field of physical intelligence, and it begins operations with a founding leadership team rather than a gradual rollout. Yu Kaichen, co-founder and chief scientist of the AI company KMind, serves as director; he is also a doctoral supervisor and assistant professor at Westlake University's School of Engineering. Jin Yaochu, a distinguished professor of artificial intelligence and head of the Department of Artificial Intelligence at Westlake University, serves as chief scientist, and multiple principal investigators share responsibility for the center's individual research directions.

According to the center's official introduction, reported by IT Home on October 31, it positions itself around the broader shift of AI from language-based cognition toward physical interaction. Its core research direction is the world model, and its stated goal is to address the bottlenecks that constrain intelligent systems from understanding physical laws, forecasting environmental change, and making interactive decisions. The center describes its approach as building an intelligence architecture that combines perception, cognition, prediction, and action, with the aim of developing general-purpose world models that can grasp physical regularities, anticipate the consequences of actions, and keep learning from real-world feedback. The objective is to enable AI to understand the world, reason about the future, and act autonomously in real environments.

Structurally, the center draws on Westlake University's research foundation and its strengths in interdisciplinary work, planning to bring together researchers from multiple fields and coordinate basic theory, key technologies, and applied exploration. Its leadership frames the center's mission in terms of building an academic base for physical intelligence. For now, the center has announced its founding and research agenda only; the available reporting contains no information on subsequent research milestones, funded projects, or early outputs.