Hi, I am Olaf. I am a third-year Ph.D. student at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics and Saarland University advised by Dr. Adam Kortylewski and Prof. Christian Theobalt. I am part of ELLIS, co-advised by Prof. Christian Rupprecht (VGG, University of Oxford). Find my personal website here: https://odunkel.github.io/.

My current research investigates how generative models can improve robustness in computer vision by leveraging learned priors and controllable data acquisition for training and evaluation. I also work on representation learning methods that better capture real-world correspondences. More broadly, I’m interested in foundational questions that make intelligent agents reliable under distribution shift. Previously, I worked on safe ML, autonomous driving, and robotics.

See my Google scholar profile.

Attention (as Discrete-Time Markov) Chains Y. Erel*, O. Dünkel*, R. Dabral, V. Golyanik, C. Theobalt, A. H. Bermano NeurIPS 2025 [Webpage]




Do It Yourself: Learning Semantic Correspondence from Pseudo-Labels O. Dünkel, T. Wimmer, C. Theobalt, C. Rupprecht, A. Kortylewski ICCV 2025 [Webpage]




CNS-Bench: Benchmarking Image Classifier Robustness Under Continuous Nuisance Shifts O. Dünkel, A. Jesslen, J. Xie, C. Theobalt, C. Rupprecht, A. Kortylewski ICCV 2025 [Webpage]




Common3D: Self-Supervised Learning of 3D Morphable Models for Common Objects in Neural Feature Space L. Sommer, O. Dünkel, C. Theobalt, A. Kortylewski CVPR 2025 [Webpage]




Normalizing Flows on the Product Space of SO(3) Manifolds for Probabilistic Human Pose Modeling O. Dünkel, T. Salzmann, F. Pfaff CVPR 2024 [paper]





Joint Vehicle Trajectory and Cut-In Prediction on Highways using Output Constrained Neural Networks M. Brosowsky, P. Orschau, O. Dünkel, P. Elspas, D. Slieter, M. Zöllner IEEE Symposium Series on Computational Intelligence, 2021 [paper]

Sample-Specific Output Constraints for Neural Networks M. Brosowsky, F. Keck, O. Dünkel, M. Zöllner AAAI 2021 [paper]

• July 2022 - October 2022:
  Research Internship Vehicle Trajectory Prediction at VITA (EPFL)

• April 2020 - July 2022:
  Founder, CTO, and Propulsion Engineer at mu-zero HYPERLOOP

• November 2019 - April 2020:
  Bachelor's Thesis on Uncertainty Estimation in Vehicle Trajetory Prediction at Porsche AG

• April 2019 - August 2019:
  Intern for Autonomous Driving and Deep Learning at Porsche AG

• October 2023 - present:
  Ph. D. student in Computer Science at the Universität des Saarlandes and the Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik
• 2020 - 2023:
  Master's Studies in Electrical Engineering and Information Technology at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
  Specialization: Signal Processing and Robotics
• 2016 - 2020
  Bachelor's Studies in Electrical Engineering and Information Technology at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology

In my free time, I enjoy running, hiking, reading, and playing the French horn.