Ben Eysenbach on Designing Simpler and More Principled RL Algorithms - 2023

Title : Ben Eysenbach on Designing Simpler and More Principled RL Algorithms Author(s): Generally Intelligent Link(s) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXMjEQvyzs0

Things like git, SSH are very important. Also, thinking about what it means to do research is also important. Research is about formulating and answering interesting questions. Focusing on questions we care about is the first step, the method/dataset etc. is not the important part.

Things like moving shadows during the day make real-world robotics systems hard. Find notions of optimality relevant for a problem being studied can be non-trivial.

Caching intermediate results in experiments is one of the best things one can do - Ben uses functools.cache.

The role of a PhD student in his mind is now about communication, the low acceptance rates in conferences are a hurdle for students to communicate what they are working on.