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Danijar Hafner

Research scientist (former DeepMind), Google DeepMind

Website and profiles

Danijar Hafner is known for the Dreamer line of model-based reinforcement learning agents and related world-model research. His site states he was previously a Staff Research Scientist at Google DeepMind in San Francisco; MIT Technology Review's Innovators Under 35 profile notes he left DeepMind to form his own startup. He earned a PhD at the University of Toronto with Jimmy Ba and earlier trained at UCL/Gatsby with Tim Lillicrap and Karl Friston.123

At a glance

Current role
None confirmed in the sources
Sources cited
3
Profile reviewed

Accomplishments

  • Lead author of Dreamer / Dreamer 3 world-model RL.31
  • Named MIT Technology Review Innovator Under 35.2

Dreamer and world models

Hafner's Dreamer agents learn behaviors by imagining futures inside learned world models. Dreamer 3 was published in Nature for mastering diverse control tasks—including collecting diamonds in Minecraft from scratch—and later Dreamer work extends offline and scalable world-model training.13

Timeline

  1. Dreamer (latent imagination) published at ICLR.1
  2. Dreamer 3 results highlighted in Nature.3

Documented roles

The sources do not confirm a current role; these are the roles they document.

Companies in their history

Suggest a correction or removal

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References

3 sources · profile reviewed Oct 24, 2026 · data updated Oct 24, 2026

  1. Danijar HafnerDanijar Hafner · Official page · accessed Oct 24, 2026
  2. Danijar Hafner | MIT Technology ReviewMIT Technology Review · News report · accessed Oct 24, 2026
  3. Mastering diverse control tasks through world modelsNature / PMC · Paper · accessed Oct 24, 2026