Jonathan Spieler

I am a second-year PhD student at the Autonomous Intelligent Systems group of the University of Bonn, advised by Professor Sven Behnke. Before starting my PhD, I was working as a software engineer on autonomous driving. I received my BEng degree from Baden-Wuerttemberg Cooperative State University (DHBW) and my MSc degree from the University of Stuttgart.

I am broadly interested in advancing machine intelligence, with particular emphasis on the following topics:

World models & RL
Dream-MPC, Slot-MPC

Robot learning

Besides research I also like cycling 🚴, bouldering 🧗, and books 📚.

Publications and preprints

Papers sorted by recency. Representative papers are highlighted.

Slot-MPC: Goal-Conditioned Model Predictive Control with Object-Centric Representations
Jonathan Spieler, Angel Villar-Corrales, Sven Behnke
Preprint, 2026
project page / arXiv / bibtex

Dream-MPC: Gradient-Based Model Predictive Control with Latent Imagination
Jonathan Spieler, Sven Behnke
International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2026
project page / arXiv / code / bibtex

Learning Gradual Argumentation Frameworks using Meta-heuristics.
Nico Potyka, Mohamad Bazo, Jonathan Spieler, Steffen Staab
ArgML@COMMA, 2022
pdf / bibtex

Interpretable Machine Learning with Gradual Argumentation Frameworks.
Jonathan Spieler, Nico Potyka, Steffen Staab
International Conference on Computational Models of Argument (COMMA), 2022
pdf / code / bibtex

Learning gradual argumentation frameworks using genetic algorithms
Jonathan Spieler, Nico Potyka, Steffen Staab
Preprint, 2021
pdf / code / bibtex

Dream-MPC Official Implementation ★ 775
Jonathan Spieler, Sven Behnke
May 2026
project page / arXiv / code / bibtex

You are welcome to contact me regarding my research! My email is spieler [at] ais.uni-bonn [dot] de