TalkRL: The Reinforcement Learning Podcast

Aravind Srinivas is back! He is now a research Scientist at OpenAI. Featured References Decision Transformer: Reinforcement Learning via Sequence Modeling Lili Chen, Kevin Lu, Aravind Rajeswaran, Kimin Lee, Aditya Grover, Michael Laskin, Pieter Abbeel, Aravind Srinivas, Igor Mordatch VideoGPT: Video Generation using VQ-VAE and Transformers Wilson Yan, Yunzhi Zhang, Pieter Abbeel, Aravind Srinivas

Dr. Rohin Shah is a Research Scientist at DeepMind, and the editor and main contributor of the Alignment Newsletter. Featured References The MineRL BASALT Competition on Learning from Human Feedback Rohin Shah, Cody Wild, Steven H. Wang, Neel Alex, Brandon Houghton, William Guss, Sharada Mohanty, Anssi Kanervisto, Stephanie Milani, Nicholay Topin, Pieter Abbeel, Stuart Russell, Anca Dragan Preferences Implicit in the State of the World Rohin Shah, Dmitrii Krasheninnikov, Jordan...

Jordan Terry is a PhD candidate at University of Maryland, the maintainer of Gym, the maintainer and creator of PettingZoo and the founder of Swarm Labs. Featured References PettingZoo: Gym for Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning J. K. Terry, Benjamin Black, Nathaniel Grammel, Mario Jayakumar, Ananth Hari, Ryan Sullivan, Luis Santos, Rodrigo Perez, Caroline Horsch, Clemens Dieffendahl, Niall L. Williams, Yashas Lokesh, Praveen Ravi PettingZoo on Github gym on Github Additional...

Robert Tjarko Lange is a PhD student working at the Technical University Berlin. Featured References Learning not to learn: Nature versus nurture in silico Lange, R. T., & Sprekeler, H. (2020) On Lottery Tickets and Minimal Task Representations in Deep Reinforcement Learning Vischer, M. A., Lange, R. T., & Sprekeler, H. (2021). Semantic RL with Action Grammars: Data-Efficient Learning of Hierarchical Task Abstractions Lange, R. T., & Faisal, A. (2019). MLE-Infrastructure on...

We hear about the idea of PERLS and why its important to talk about. Political Economy of Reinforcement Learning (PERLS) Workshop at NeurIPS 2021 NeurIPS 2021

Amy Zhang is a postdoctoral scholar at UC Berkeley and a research scientist at Facebook AI Research. She will be starting as an assistant professor at UT Austin in Spring 2023. Featured References Invariant Causal Prediction for Block MDPs Amy Zhang, Clare Lyle, Shagun Sodhani, Angelos Filos, Marta Kwiatkowska, Joelle Pineau, Yarin Gal, Doina Precup Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning with Context-based Representations Shagun Sodhani, Amy Zhang, Joelle Pineau MBRL-Lib: A Modular Library...

Xianyuan Zhan is currently a research assistant professor at the Institute for AI Industry Research (AIR), Tsinghua University. He received his Ph.D. degree at Purdue University. Before joining Tsinghua University, Dr. Zhan worked as a researcher at Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA) and a data scientist at JD Technology. At JD Technology, he led the research that uses offline RL to optimize real-world industrial systems. Featured References DeepThermal: Combustion Optimization for Thermal...

Eugene Vinitsky is a PhD student at UC Berkeley advised by Alexandre Bayen. He has interned at Tesla and Deepmind. Featured References A learning agent that acquires social norms from public sanctions in decentralized multi-agent settings Eugene Vinitsky, Raphael Köster, John P. Agapiou, Edgar Duéñez-Guzmán, Alexander Sasha Vezhnevets, Joel Z. Leibo Optimizing Mixed Autonomy Traffic Flow With Decentralized Autonomous Vehicles and Multi-Agent RL Eugene Vinitsky, Nathan Lichtle, Kanaad...

Dr. Jess Whittlestone is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk and the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, both at the University of Cambridge. Featured References The Societal Implications of Deep Reinforcement Learning Jess Whittlestone, Kai Arulkumaran, Matthew Crosby Artificial Canaries: Early Warning Signs for Anticipatory and Democratic Governance of AI Carla Zoe Cremer, Jess Whittlestone Additional References CogX: Cutting Edge:...

Dr Aleksandra Faust is a Staff Research Scientist and Reinforcement Learning research team co-founder at Google Brain Research. Featured References Reinforcement Learning and Planning for Preference Balancing Tasks Faust 2014 Learning Navigation Behaviors End-to-End with AutoRL Hao-Tien Lewis Chiang, Aleksandra Faust, Marek Fiser, Anthony Francis Evolving Rewards to Automate Reinforcement Learning Aleksandra Faust, Anthony Francis, Dar Mehta Evolving Reinforcement Learning...

Sam Ritter is a Research Scientist on the neuroscience team at DeepMind. Featured References Unsupervised Predictive Memory in a Goal-Directed Agent (MERLIN) Greg Wayne, Chia-Chun Hung, David Amos, Mehdi Mirza, Arun Ahuja, Agnieszka Grabska-Barwinska, Jack Rae, Piotr Mirowski, Joel Z. Leibo, Adam Santoro, Mevlana Gemici, Malcolm Reynolds, Tim Harley, Josh Abramson, Shakir Mohamed, Danilo Rezende, David Saxton, Adam Cain, Chloe Hillier, David Silver, Koray Kavukcuoglu, Matt Botvinick,...

Thomas Krendl Gilbert is a PhD student at UC Berkeley’s Center for Human-Compatible AI, specializing in Machine Ethics and Epistemology. Featured References Hard Choices in Artificial Intelligence: Addressing Normative Uncertainty through Sociotechnical Commitments Roel Dobbe, Thomas Krendl Gilbert, Yonatan Mintz Mapping the Political Economy of Reinforcement Learning Systems: The Case of Autonomous Vehicles Thomas Krendl Gilbert AI Development for the Public Interest: From Abstraction...

Professor Marc G. Bellemare is a Research Scientist at Google Research (Brain team), An Adjunct Professor at McGill University, and a Canada CIFAR AI Chair. Featured References The Arcade Learning Environment: An Evaluation Platform for General Agents Marc G. Bellemare, Yavar Naddaf, Joel Veness, Michael Bowling Human-level control through deep reinforcement learning Volodymyr Mnih, Koray Kavukcuoglu, David Silver, Andrei A. Rusu, Joel Veness, Marc G. Bellemare, Alex Graves, Martin...

Robert Osazuwa Ness is an adjunct professor of computer science at Northeastern University, an ML Research Engineer at Gamalon, and the founder of AltDeep School of AI. He holds a PhD in statistics. He studied at Johns Hopkins SAIS and then Purdue University. References Altdeep School of AITwitchSubstackAltdeep Causal Generative Machine Learning MinicourseRobert Osazuwa Ness on Google ScholarGamalon IncCausal Reinforcement LearningThe Bitter LessonThe Need for Biases in Learning...

Dr. Marlos C. Machado is a research scientist at DeepMind and an adjunct professor at the University of Alberta. He holds a PhD from the University of Alberta and a MSc and BSc from UFMG, in Brazil. Featured References Revisiting the Arcade Learning Environment: Evaluation Protocols and Open Problems for General Agents Marlos C. Machado, Marc G. Bellemare, Erik Talvitie, Joel Veness, Matthew J. Hausknecht, Michael Bowling Contrastive Behavioral Similarity Embeddings for Generalization in...

Nathan Lambert is a PhD Candidate at UC Berkeley. Featured References Learning Accurate Long-term Dynamics for Model-based Reinforcement Learning Nathan O. Lambert, Albert Wilcox, Howard Zhang, Kristofer S. J. Pister, Roberto Calandra Objective Mismatch in Model-based Reinforcement Learning Nathan Lambert, Brandon Amos, Omry Yadan, Roberto Calandra Low Level Control of a Quadrotor with Deep Model-Based Reinforcement Learning Nathan O. Lambert, Daniel S. Drew, Joseph Yaconelli, Roberto...

Kai Arulkumaran is a researcher at Araya in Tokyo. Featured References AlphaStar: An Evolutionary Computation Perspective Kai Arulkumaran, Antoine Cully, Julian Togelius Analysing Deep Reinforcement Learning Agents Trained with Domain Randomisation Tianhong Dai, Kai Arulkumaran, Tamara Gerbert, Samyakh Tukra, Feryal Behbahani, Anil Anthony Bharath Training Agents using Upside-Down Reinforcement Learning Rupesh Kumar Srivastava, Pranav Shyam, Filipe Mutz, Wojciech Jaśkowski, Jürgen...

Michael Dennis is a PhD student at the Center for Human-Compatible AI at UC Berkeley, supervised by Professor Stuart Russell. I'm interested in robustness in RL and multi-agent RL, specifically as it applies to making the interaction between AI systems and society at large to be more beneficial. --Michael Dennis Featured References Emergent Complexity and Zero-shot Transfer via Unsupervised Environment Design [PAIRED] Michael Dennis, Natasha Jaques, Eugene Vinitsky, Alexandre Bayen,...

Roman Ring is a Research Engineer at DeepMind. Featured References Grandmaster level in StarCraft II using multi-agent reinforcement learning Vinyals et al, 2019 Replicating DeepMind StarCraft II Reinforcement Learning Benchmark with Actor-Critic Methods Roman Ring, 2018 Additional References Relational Deep Reinforcement LearningStarCraft II: A New Challenge for Reinforcement LearningSafe and Efficient Off-Policy Reinforcement LearningλSample Efficient Actor-Critic with Experience...

Shimon Whiteson is a Professor of Computer Science at Oxford University, the head of WhiRL, the Whiteson Research Lab at Oxford, and Head of Research at Waymo UK. Featured References VariBAD: A Very Good Method for Bayes-Adaptive Deep RL via Meta-Learning Luisa Zintgraf, Kyriacos Shiarlis, Maximilian Igl, Sebastian Schulze, Yarin Gal, Katja Hofmann, Shimon Whiteson Monotonic Value Function Factorisation for Deep Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Tabish Rashid, Mikayel Samvelyan,...