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Jonathan Cook

5 accepted papers

2026

Programming by Backprop: Learning Behaviour from Symbolic Descriptions

ICLR 2026poster

Large language models (LLMs) are typically trained to acquire behaviours from demonstrations or experience, yet much of their training data consists of symbolic descriptions: instructions, rules, and strategies that specify procedures without examples. We investigate whether LLMs can learn to execut…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Ad-Hoc Human-AI Coordination Challenge

ICML 2025spotlight

Achieving seamless coordination between AI agents and humans is crucial for real-world applications, yet it remains a significant open challenge. Hanabi is a cooperative card game featuring imperfect information, constrained communication, theory of mind requirements, and coordinated action -- makin…

2024

Artificial Generational Intelligence: Cultural Accumulation in Reinforcement Learning

NeurIPS 2024poster

Cultural accumulation drives the open-ended and diverse progress in capabilities spanning human history. It builds an expanding body of knowledge and skills by combining individual exploration with inter-generational information transmission. Despite its widespread success among humans, the capacity…

2024

JaxMARL: Multi-Agent RL Environments and Algorithms in JAX

NeurIPS 2024poster

Benchmarks are crucial in the development of machine learning algorithms, significantly influencing reinforcement learning (RL) research through the available environments. Traditionally, RL environments run on the CPU, which limits their scalability with the computational resources typically availa…

2023

SMACv2: An Improved Benchmark for Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

NeurIPS 2023poster

The availability of challenging benchmarks has played a key role in the recent progress of machine learning. In cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning, the StarCraft Multi-Agent Challenge (SMAC) has become a popular testbed for centralised training with decentralised execution. However, aft…