Antonin Raffin and Ashley Hill

Antonin Raffin and Ashley Hill discuss Stable Baselines past, present and future, State Representation Learning, S-RL Toolbox, RL on real robots, big compute for RL and much more!

Show Notes

Antonin Raffin is a researcher at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) in Munich, working in the Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics. His research is on using machine learning for controlling real robots (because simulation is not enough), with a particular interest for reinforcement learning. 

Ashley Hill is doing his thesis on improving control algorithms using machine learning for real time gain tuning. 

He works mainly with neuroevolution, genetic algorithms, and of course reinforcement learning, applied to mobile robots.  He holds a masters degree in Machine learning, and a bachelors in Computer science from the Université Paris-Saclay. 

Featured References 

stable-baselines on github 
Ashley Hill, Antonin Raffin primary authors. 

S-RL Toolbox 
Antonin Raffin, Ashley Hill, René Traoré, Timothée Lesort, Natalia Díaz-Rodríguez, David Filliat 

Decoupling feature extraction from policy learning: assessing benefits of state representation learning in goal based robotics 
Antonin Raffin, Ashley Hill, René Traoré, Timothée Lesort, Natalia Díaz-Rodríguez, David Filliat 


Additional References 

• Learning to Drive Smoothly in Minutes, Antonin Raffin 
• Multimodal SRL (best paper at ICRA): Making Sense of Vision and Touch: Self-Supervised Learning of Multimodal  Representations for Contact-Rich Tasks,  Michelle A. Lee, Yuke Zhu, Krishnan Srinivasan, Parth Shah, Silvio Savarese, Li Fei-Fei, Animesh Garg, Jeannette Bohg 
• Benchmarking Model-Based Reinforcement Learning, Tingwu Wang, Xuchan Bao, Ignasi Clavera, Jerrick Hoang, Yeming Wen, Eric Langlois, Shunshi Zhang, Guodong Zhang, Pieter Abbeel, Jimmy Ba 
• TossingBot: Learning to Throw Arbitrary Objects with Residual Physics 
  Andy Zeng, Shuran Song, Johnny Lee, Alberto Rodriguez, Thomas Funkhouser 
• Stable Baselines roadmap 
• OpenAI baselines stable-baselines github pull request 

Creators & Guests

Host

Robin Ranjit Singh Chauhan

🌱 Head of Eng @AgFunder 🧠 AI:Reinforcement Learning/ML/DL/NLP🎙️Host @TalkRLPodcast 💳 ex-@Microsoft ecomm PgmMgr 🤖 @UWaterloo CompEng 🇨🇦 🇮🇳

What is TalkRL: The Reinforcement Learning Podcast?

TalkRL podcast is All Reinforcement Learning, All the Time.
In-depth interviews with brilliant people at the forefront of RL research and practice.
Guests from places like MILA, OpenAI, MIT, DeepMind, Berkeley, Amii, Oxford, Google Research, Brown, Waymo, Caltech, and Vector Institute.
Hosted by Robin Ranjit Singh Chauhan.