Event Details

PhD Thesis Proposal - Gautam Salhotra

Thu, Mar 23, 2023
9:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Location: RTH 406
Title: Accelerating Robot Reinforcement Learning Using Demonstrations

Committee: Gaurav Sukhatme, SK Gupta, Laurent Itti, Stefanos Nikolaidis, Somil Bansal

Date: Thursday March 23, 9am PST

Abstract:
Reinforcement learning is a promising and, recently, popular tool to solve robotic tasks such as object manipulation and locomotion. However, it is also well known for being a very hard problem setting to explore in. In contrast, Learning from demonstrations (LfD) methods train agents to the desired solution using demonstrations from a teacher.
I will explore the role of LfD methods to guide the exploration of RL methods, with the aim of applying it to regular object manipulation tasks. I will talk about work that uses planners and trajectory optimizers to guide RL, and then discuss the role human experts can play in LfD for RL. Finally, I will talk about proposed projects that can extend the current work to get the benefits of demonstrations while avoiding the downsides of obtaining them.