The Tea Time Talks 2020: Week Twelve

Now that the 2020 Tea Time Talks are on Youtube, you can always have time for tea with Amii and the RLAI Lab! Hosted by Amii’s Chief Scientific Advisory Dr. Richard S. Sutton, these 20-minute talks on technical topics are delivered by students, faculty and guests. The talks are a relaxed and informal way of hearing leaders in AI discuss future lines of research they may explore, with topics ranging from ideas starting to take root to fully-finished projects.

Week twelve of the Tea Time Talks features:

Matthew McLeod: Intrinsically Motivated GVF Agent

Intrinsic motivation and general value functions (GVFs) are two exciting areas in the field of reinforcement learning. In this talk, Matthew discusses the intersection of these two subfields and why they may be complementary to each other. He analyzes this problem with a tabular Markov decision process (MDP) and discusses interesting initial results.

Shiva Soleimany: Improving sim-to-real transfers using computational creativity

In this talk, Shiva talks about reinforcement learning for robotics, and how we can improve training. She proposes a method to narrow down the reality gap in a simulated environment using an adversarial agent that generates creative novel environments.

Katya Kudashkina: Model-based reinforcement learning with one-step expectation models

A one-step expectation model of the environment dynamics produces an estimate of the expected next state. This is less general than estimating the full distribution of possible next states (or a random sample thereof) and more general than modeling the world as deterministic. Expectation models are limited in the kinds of planning operations and value-function approximations they can use, but are well suited to being learned. In this talk, Katya discusses what is known about expectation models in the context of model-based reinforcement learning and states that are non-Markov. She shows that planning with expectation models can be done only with state values and not action values.

The Tea Time Talks have now concluded for the year! Rewatch or catch up on previous talks on our Youtube playlist.