Neurips 2024 RL meetup Hot takes: What sucks about RL?

12/23/24 • 17 min

TalkRL: The Reinforcement Learning Podcast

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 :)

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 :)

Previous Episode

RLC 2024 - Posters and Hallways 5

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

Next Episode

Abhishek Naik on Continuing RL & Average Reward

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)

TalkRL: The Reinforcement Learning Podcast - Neurips 2024 RL meetup Hot takes: What sucks about RL?

Transcript

Speaker 100:00:02.159

TalkRL.

Speaker 200:00:05.040

TalkRL Podcast is all reinforcement learning all the time, featuring brilliant guests, both research and applied. Join the conversation on Twitter at talk r l podcast. I'm your host, Robin Chohan. K. We're doing a hot takes episode on what sucks about RL. We're at the RL meetup after after your reps on Wednesday, in here in Vancouver at the Pearl Club. And what sucks about RL?