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Alistair Letcher

9 accepted papers

2026

Evolution Strategies at the Hyperscale

ICML 2026poster

Evolution Strategies (ES) is a class of powerful black-box optimisation methods that are highly parallelisable and can handle non-differentiable and noisy objectives. However, naïve ES becomes prohibitively expensive at scale on GPUs due to the low arithmetic intensity of batched matrix multiplicati…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Goal-Conditioned Agents that Learn Everything All at Once

ICML 2026poster

A goal-conditioned reinforcement learning agent acting in an environment will see a wealth of information throughout a trajectory, most of which is discarded when only considering the trajectory with respect to a single goal. All-goals learning, where each transition is used for learning off-policy …

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Procedural Generation Of Algorithm Discovery Tasks in Machine Learning

ICML 2026poster

Automating the development of machine learning algorithms has the potential to unlock new breakthroughs. However, our ability to improve and evaluate algorithm discovery systems has thus far been limited by existing task suites. They suffer from many issues, such as: poor evaluation methodologies; d…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2022

Discovered Policy Optimisation

NeurIPS 2022accept

Tremendous progress has been made in reinforcement learning (RL) over the past decade. Most of these advancements came through the continual development of new algorithms, which were designed using a combination of mathematical derivations, intuitions, and experimentation. Such an approach of creati…

Cited by 93SourcePDFScholar
2020

Ridge Rider: Finding Diverse Solutions by Following Eigenvectors of the Hessian

NeurIPS 2020poster

Over the last decade, a single algorithm has changed many facets of our lives - Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD). In the era of ever decreasing loss functions, SGD and its various offspring have become the go-to optimization tool in machine learning and are a key component of the success of deep ne…

2019

Stable Opponent Shaping in Differentiable Games

ICLR 2019poster

A growing number of learning methods are actually differentiable games whose players optimise multiple, interdependent objectives in parallel – from GANs and intrinsic curiosity to multi-agent RL. Opponent shaping is a powerful approach to improve learning dynamics in these games, accounting for pla…

Cited by 131SourcePDFScholar
2018

Automatic Conflict Detection in Police Body-Worn Audio

ICASSP 2018accepted

Automatic conflict detection has grown in relevance with the advent of body-worn technology, but existing metrics such as turn-taking and overlap are poor indicators of conflict in police-public interactions. Moreover, standard techniques to compute them fall short when applied to such diversified a…

Cited by 0SourceScholar