News | Whiteson Research Lab

01 Jul

IJCAI Survey: Reinforcement Learning Informed by Natural Language

To be successful in real-world tasks, Reinforcement Learning (RL) needs to exploit the compositional, relational, and hierarchical structure of the world, and learn to transfer it to the task at hand. Recent advances in representation learning for language make it possible to build models that acquire world knowledge from text corpora and integrate this knowledge into downstream decision making problems. We thus argue that the time is right to investigate a tight integration of natural language understanding into RL [...]

29 May

Vacancy: PostDoc

Together with Katja Hofmann (Microsoft Cambridge), we are hiring a postdoc for a special joint position in WhiRL at the University of Oxford and Microsoft Research Cambridge. More information: http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/news/1673-full.html

29 May

ICML 2019

WhiRL has four accepted papers at ICML this year! Camera ready versions can be found here:“A Baseline for Any Order Gradient Estimation in Stochastic Computation Graphs” – Jingkai Mao‚ Jakob Foerster‚ Tim Rocktäschel‚ Maruan Al−Shedivat‚ Gregory Farquhar and Shimon Whiteson“Fingerprint Policy Optimisation for Robust Reinforcement Learning” – Supratik Paul‚ Michael A. Osborne and Shimon Whiteson“Fast Context Adaptation via Meta−Learning” – Luisa Zintgraf‚ Kyriacos Shiarlis‚ Vitaly Kurin‚ Katja Hofmann and Shimon Whiteson“Bayesian Action Decoder for Deep Multi−Agent Reinforcement Learning” [...]

10 Sep

New blog post: Advice for short-term machine learning research projects

Tim Rocktäschel, Jakob Foerster and Greg Farquhar Every year we get contacted by students who wish to work on short-term machine learning research projects with us. By now, we have supervised a good number of them and we noticed that some of the advice that we gave followed a few recurring principles. In this post, we share what we believe is good advice for a master’s thesis project or a summer research internship in machine learning. This post is by [...]

13 May

Five papers accepted at ICML 2018

All our five submissions for ICML 2018 have just been accepted: DiCE: The Infinitely Differentiable Monte Carlo Estimator Jakob Foerster, Gregory Farquhar, Maruan Al-Shedivat, Tim Rocktäschel, Eric Xing, Shimon Whiteson QMIX: Monotonic Value Function Factorisation for Deep Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Tabish Rashid, Mikayel Samvelyan, Christian Schroeder, Gregory Farquhar, Jakob Foerster, Shimon Whiteson Fourier Policy Gradients Matthew Fellows, Kamil Ciosek, Shimon Whiteson Deep Variational Reinforcement Learning for POMDPs Maximilian Igl, Luisa Zintgraf, Tuan Anh Le, Frank Wood, Shimon Whiteson TACO: Learning Task Decomposition via Temporal Alignment for Control Kyriacos Shiarlis, [...]

09 Mar

Video for AAAI-18 oral “Expected Policy Gradients” by K. Ciosek and S. Whiteson.

Our lab member Kamil Ciosek has published a video of his presentation of his recent paper “Expected Policy Gradients” (together with Shimon Whiteson) at AAAI-18.

03 Feb

Paper accepted at ICLR 2018

Our paper “TreeQN and ATreeC: Differentiable Tree Planning for Deep Reinforcement Learning” has been accepted at #ICLR2018 ! Congratulations to Gregory Farquhar, Tim Rocktäschel, Maximilian Igl and Shimon Whiteson.

26 Jan

WhiRL members have two papers accepted at AAMAS 2018

We’re happy to announce that WhiRL members have two accepted papers at #AAMAS2018 this year.Learning with Opponent-Learning Awareness Jakob N. Foerster, Richard Y. Chen, Maruan Al-Shedivat, Shimon Whiteson, Pieter Abbeel, Igor Mordatch. Arxiv version: https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.04326 Ordered Preference Elicitation Strategies for Supporting Multi-Objective Decision Making, Luisa M Zintgraf, Diederik M Roijers, Sjoerd Linders, Catholijn M Jonker, Ann Nowé (arxiv.org/abs/1802.07606 )

16 Jan

Wendelin Boehmer joins WhiRL

Wendelin Boehmer has joined WhiRL as a new postdoctoral researcher.

16 Jan

Outstanding Student Paper at AAAI-18

Our paper “Counterfactual Multi−Agent Policy Gradients” by Jakob Foerster‚ Gregory Farquhar‚ Triantafyllos Afouras‚ Nantas Nardelli and Shimon Whiteson has been selected as the Outstanding Student Paper for AAAI-18! Congratulations to all authors!