EDBT 2026 Demo / reviewers in the wild / expert
Robby Costales
dblp:263/7351
· DBLP profile ↗
3ranked-venue papers
2as first author
3since 2021 · last 2024
—ORCID · none
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 3 · 2 first-author · 3 since 2021
Expertise — from the expertise taxonomy: the topics of the expert's papers under the CCF categories. A weight counts papers with recency: 1 for a paper about the topic, 0.3 when the topic is its context, halved every five years.
| Artificial intelligence
3 papers |
Reinforcement learning · 76% Robot manipulation · 10% Representation and self-supervised learning · 10% |
Topics — the 11 heaviest of 12, each with the papers that count most for it
| Topic | Weight | Papers | Last | Evidence papers |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Machine learning › Reinforcement learning › reinforcement learning environment
environment design |
0.8 | 1 | 2024 | Enabling Adaptive Agent Training in Open-Ended Simulators by Targeting Diversity · NeurIPS 2024 |
Machine learning › Reinforcement learning
meta-reinforcement learning |
0.8 | 1 | 2024 | Enabling Adaptive Agent Training in Open-Ended Simulators by Targeting Diversity · NeurIPS 2024 |
Machine learning › Reinforcement learning › reinforcement learning environment › environment design
unsupervised environment design |
0.8 | 1 | 2024 | Enabling Adaptive Agent Training in Open-Ended Simulators by Targeting Diversity · NeurIPS 2024 |
Robotics › Robot manipulation
affordance learning |
0.6 | 1 | 2022 | Possibility Before Utility: Learning And Using Hierarchical Affordances · ICLR 2022 |
Machine learning › Representation and self-supervised learning › representation learning
hierarchical learning |
0.6 | 1 | 2022 | ALMA: Hierarchical Learning for Composite Multi-Agent Tasks · NeurIPS 2022 |
Machine learning › Reinforcement learning
hierarchical reinforcement learning |
0.6 | 1 | 2022 | Possibility Before Utility: Learning And Using Hierarchical Affordances · ICLR 2022 |
Machine learning › Reinforcement learning
multi-agent reinforcement learning |
0.6 | 1 | 2022 | ALMA: Hierarchical Learning for Composite Multi-Agent Tasks · NeurIPS 2022 |
Machine learning › Reinforcement learning › hierarchical reinforcement learning
option discovery |
0.6 | 1 | 2022 | Possibility Before Utility: Learning And Using Hierarchical Affordances · ICLR 2022 |
Machine learning › Transfer learning and domain adaptation › sim-to-real transfer
domain randomization |
0.2 | 1 | 2024 | Enabling Adaptive Agent Training in Open-Ended Simulators by Targeting Diversity · NeurIPS 2024 |
Machine learning › Reinforcement learning
modular policy |
0.2 | 1 | 2022 | ALMA: Hierarchical Learning for Composite Multi-Agent Tasks · NeurIPS 2022 |
Machine learning › Reinforcement learning
policy learning |
0.2 | 1 | 2022 | ALMA: Hierarchical Learning for Composite Multi-Agent Tasks · NeurIPS 2022 |
Methods — techniques the papers use, named apart from their topics
procedural generation · 0.8evolutionary algorithm · 0.8multi-agent reinforcement learning · 0.6hierarchical reinforcement learning · 0.6
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | Enabling Adaptive Agent Training in Open-Ended Simulators by Targeting DiversityabstractThe wider application of end-to-end learning methods to embodied decision-making domains remains bottlenecked by their reliance on a superabundance of training data representative of the target domain.
Meta-reinforcement learning (meta-RL) approaches abandon the aim of zero-shot *generalization*—the goal of standard reinforcement learning (RL)—in favor of few-shot *adaptation*, and thus hold promise for bridging larger generalization gaps.
While learning this meta-level adaptive behavior still requires substantial data, efficient environment simulators approaching real-world complexity are growing in prevalence.
Even so, hand-designing sufficiently diverse and numerous simulated training tasks for these complex domains is prohibitively labor-intensive.
Domain randomization (DR) and procedural generation (PG), offered as solutions to this problem, require simulators to possess carefully-defined parameters which directly translate to meaningful task diversity—a similarly prohibitive assumption.
In this work, we present **DIVA**, an evolutionary approach for generating diverse training tasks in such complex, open-ended simulators.
Like unsupervised environment design (UED) methods, DIVA can be applied to arbitrary parameterizations, but can additionally incorporate realistically-available domain knowledge—thus inheriting the *flexibility* and *generality* of UED, and the supervised *structure* embedded in well-designed simulators exploited by DR and PG.
Our empirical results showcase DIVA's unique ability to overcome complex parameterizations and successfully train adaptive agent behavior, far outperforming competitive baselines from prior literature.
These findings highlight the potential of such *semi-supervised environment design* (SSED) approaches, of which DIVA is the first humble constituent, to enable training in realistic simulated domains, and produce more robust and capable adaptive agents.
Our code is available at [https://github.com/robbycostales/diva](https://github.com/robbycostales/diva). Robby Costales, Stefanos Nikolaidis |
NeurIPS | 1 |
| 2022 | Possibility Before Utility: Learning And Using Hierarchical Affordances
Robby Costales, Shariq Iqbal, Fei Sha |
ICLR | 1 |
| 2022 | ALMA: Hierarchical Learning for Composite Multi-Agent TasksabstractDespite significant progress on multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) in recent years, coordination in complex domains remains a challenge. Work in MARL often focuses on solving tasks where agents interact with all other agents and entities in the environment; however, we observe that real-world tasks are often composed of several isolated instances of local agent interactions (subtasks), and each agent can meaningfully focus on one subtask to the exclusion of all else in the environment. In these composite tasks, successful policies can often be decomposed into two levels of decision-making: agents are allocated to specific subtasks and each agent acts productively towards their assigned subtask alone. This decomposed decision making provides a strong structural inductive bias, significantly reduces agent observation spaces, and encourages subtask-specific policies to be reused and composed during training, as opposed to treating each new composition of subtasks as unique. We introduce ALMA, a general learning method for taking advantage of these structured tasks. ALMA simultaneously learns a high-level subtask allocation policy and low-level agent policies. We demonstrate that ALMA learns sophisticated coordination behavior in a number of challenging environments, outperforming strong baselines. ALMA's modularity also enables it to better generalize to new environment configurations. Finally, we find that while ALMA can integrate separately trained allocation and action policies, the best performance is obtained only by training all components jointly. Our code is available at https://github.com/shariqiqbal2810/ALMA Shariq Iqbal, Robby Costales, Fei Sha |
NeurIPS | 2 |