TalkRL: The Reinforcement Learning Podcast

Posters and Hallway episodes are short interviews and poster summaries.  Recorded at NeurIPS 2024 in Vancouver BC Canada.   

Featuring  

• Claire Bizon Monroc from Inria: WFCRL: A Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Benchmark for Wind Farm Control  
• Andrew Wagenmaker from UC Berkeley: Overcoming the Sim-to-Real Gap: Leveraging Simulation to Learn to Explore for Real-World RL  
• Harley Wiltzer from MILA: Foundations of Multivariate Distributional Reinforcement Learning  
• Vinzenz Thoma from ETH AI Center: Contextual Bilevel Reinforcement Learning for Incentive Alignment  
• Haozhe (Tony) Chen & Ang (Leon) Li from Columbia: QGym: Scalable Simulation and Benchmarking of Queuing Network Controllers  

Posters and Hallway episodes are short interviews and poster summaries.  Recorded at NeurIPS 2024 in Vancouver BC Canada.   

Featuring  

• Jonathan Cook from University of Oxford: Artificial Generational Intelligence: Cultural Accumulation in Reinforcement Learning  
• Yifei Zhou from Berkeley AI Research: DigiRL: Training In-The-Wild Device-Control Agents with Autonomous Reinforcement Learning  
• Rory Young from University of Glasgow: Enhancing Robustness in Deep Reinforcement Learning: A Lyapunov Exponent Approach  
• Glen Berseth from MILA: Improving Deep Reinforcement Learning by Reducing the Chain Effect of Value and Policy Churn  
• Alexander Rutherford from University of Oxford: JaxMARL: Multi-Agent RL Environments and Algorithms in JAX  

Posters and Hallway episodes are short interviews and poster summaries.  Recorded at NeurIPS 2024 in Vancouver BC Canada.   

Featuring  

• Jiaheng Hu of University of Texas: Disentangled Unsupervised Skill Discovery for Efficient Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning  
• Skander Moalla of EPFL: No Representation, No Trust: Connecting Representation, Collapse, and Trust Issues in PPO  
• Adil Zouitine of IRT Saint Exupery/Hugging Face : Time-Constrained Robust MDPs  
• Soumyendu Sarkar of HP Labs : SustainDC: Benchmarking for Sustainable Data Center Control  
• Matteo Bettini of Cambridge University: BenchMARL: Benchmarking Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning  
• Michael Bowling of U Alberta : Beyond Optimism: Exploration With Partially Observable Rewards  

Abhishek Naik was a student at University of Alberta and Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute, and he just finished his PhD in reinforcement learning, working with Rich Sutton.  Now he is a postdoc fellow at the National Research Council of Canada, where he does AI research on Space applications. 

Featured References 

Reinforcement Learning for Continuing Problems Using Average Reward
Abhishek Naik Ph.D. dissertation 2024 

Reward Centering
Abhishek Naik, Yi Wan, Manan Tomar, Richard S. Sutton 2024   

Learning and Planning in Average-Reward Markov Decision Processes
Yi Wan, Abhishek Naik, Richard S. Sutton 2020 

Discounted Reinforcement Learning Is Not an Optimization Problem 
Abhishek Naik, Roshan Shariff, Niko Yasui, Hengshuai Yao, Richard S. Sutton 2019  

Additional References 

• Explaining dopamine through prediction errors and beyond, Gershman et al 2024 (proposes Differential-TD-like learning mechanism in the brain around Box 4)  

What do RL researchers complain about after hours at the bar?  In this "Hot takes" episode, we find out!  

Recorded at The Pearl in downtown Vancouver, during the RL meetup after a day of Neurips 2024.  

Special thanks to "David Beckham" for the inspiration :)  

Posters and Hallway episodes are short interviews and poster summaries.  Recorded at RLC 2024 in Amherst MA.   

Featuring:  

• 0:01 David Radke of the Chicago Blackhawks NHL on RL for professional sports  
• 0:56 Abhishek Naik from the National Research Council on Continuing RL and Average Reward  
• 2:42 Daphne Cornelisse from NYU on Autonomous Driving and Multi-Agent RL  
• 08:58 Shray Bansal from Georgia Tech on Cognitive Bias for Human AI Ad hoc Teamwork  
• 10:21 Claas Voelcker from University of Toronto on Can we hop in general?  
• 11:23 Brent Venable from The Institute for Human & Machine Cognition on Cooperative information dissemination  

  
  

Posters and Hallway episodes are short interviews and poster summaries.  Recorded at RLC 2024 in Amherst MA.   

Featuring:  

• 0:01  David Abel from DeepMind on 3 Dogmas of RL  
• 0:55 Kevin Wang from Brown on learning variable depth search for MCTS  
• 2:17 Ashwin Kumar from Washington University in St Louis on fairness in resource allocation  
• 3:36 Prabhat Nagarajan from UAlberta on Value overestimation  

Posters and Hallway episodes are short interviews and poster summaries.  Recorded at RLC 2024 in Amherst MA.  

Featuring:  

• 0:01 Kris De Asis from Openmind on Time Discretization  
• 2:23 Anna Hakhverdyan from U of Alberta on Online Hyperparameters  
• 3:59 Dilip Arumugam from Princeton on Information Theory and Exploration  
• 5:04 Micah Carroll from UC Berkeley on Changing preferences and AI alignment  

Posters and Hallway episodes are short interviews and poster summaries.  Recorded at RLC 2024 in Amherst MA.  

Featuring:  

• 0:01 Hector Kohler from Centre Inria de l'Université de Lille with "Interpretable and Editable Programmatic Tree Policies for Reinforcement Learning"  
• 2:29 Quentin Delfosse from TU Darmstadt on "Interpretable Concept Bottlenecks to Align Reinforcement Learning Agents"  
• 4:15 Sonja Johnson-Yu from Harvard on "Understanding biological active sensing behaviors by interpreting learned artificial agent policies"  
• 6:42 Jannis Blüml from TU Darmstadt on "OCAtari: Object-Centric Atari 2600 Reinforcement Learning Environments"  
• 8:20 Cameron Allen from UC Berkeley on "Resolving Partial Observability in Decision Processes via the Lambda Discrepancy"  
• 9:48 James Staley from Tufts on "Agent-Centric Human Demonstrations Train World Models"  
• 14:54 Jonathan Li from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute  

Posters and Hallway episodes are short interviews and poster summaries.  Recorded at RLC 2024 in Amherst MA.  

Featuring:  

• 0:01 Ann Huang from Harvard on Learning Dynamics and the Geometry of Neural Dynamics in Recurrent Neural Controllers  
• 1:37 Jannis Blüml from TU Darmstadt on HackAtari: Atari Learning Environments for Robust and Continual Reinforcement Learning  
• 3:13 Benjamin Fuhrer from NVIDIA on Gradient Boosting Reinforcement Learning  
• 3:54 Paul Festor from Imperial College London on Evaluating the impact of explainable RL on physician decision-making in high-fidelity simulations: insights from eye-tracking metrics