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Josh Merel

14 accepted papers

2024

Universal Humanoid Motion Representations for Physics-Based Control

ICLR 2024spotlight

We present a universal motion representation that encompasses a comprehensive range of motor skills for physics-based humanoid control. Due to the high dimensionality of humanoids and the inherent difficulties in reinforcement learning, prior methods have focused on learning skill embeddings for a n…

Cited by 58SourcePDFScholar
2024

emg2pose: A Large and Diverse Benchmark for Surface Electromyographic Hand Pose Estimation

NeurIPS 2024poster

Hands are the primary means through which humans interact with the world. Reliable and always-available hand pose inference could yield new and intuitive control schemes for human-computer interactions, particularly in virtual and augmented reality. Computer vision is effective but requires one or m…

2022

Data augmentation for efficient learning from parametric experts

NeurIPS 2022accept

We present a simple, yet powerful data-augmentation technique to enable data-efficient learning from parametric experts for reinforcement and imitation learning. We focus on what we call the policy cloning setting, in which we use online or offline queries of an expert or expert policy to inform the…

Cited by 12SourcePDFScholar
2022

Evaluating Model-Based Planning and Planner Amortization for Continuous Control

ICLR 2022poster

There is a widespread intuition that model-based control methods should be able to surpass the data efficiency of model-free approaches. In this paper we attempt to evaluate this intuition on various challenging locomotion tasks. We take a hybrid approach, combining model predictive control (MPC) wi…

Cited by 17SourcePDFScholar
2022

Learning transferable motor skills with hierarchical latent mixture policies

ICLR 2022spotlight

For robots operating in the real world, it is desirable to learn reusable abstract behaviours that can effectively be transferred across numerous tasks and scenarios. We propose an approach to learn skills from data using a hierarchical mixture latent variable model. Our method exploits a multi-leve…

Cited by 38SourcePDFScholar
2022

NeuPL: Neural Population Learning

ICLR 2022poster

Learning in strategy games (e.g. StarCraft, poker) requires the discovery of diverse policies. This is often achieved by iteratively training new policies against existing ones, growing a policy population that is robust to exploit. This iterative approach suffers from two issues in real-world games…

Cited by 24SourcePDFScholar
2020

CoMic: Complementary Task Learning & Mimicry for Reusable Skills

ICML 2020poster

Learning to control complex bodies and reuse learned behaviors is a longstanding challenge in continuous control. We study the problem of learning reusable humanoid skills by imitating motion capture data and joint training with complementary tasks. We show that it is possible to learn reusable skil…

Cited by 58SourcePDFScholar
2020

Deep neuroethology of a virtual rodent

ICLR 2020spotlight

Parallel developments in neuroscience and deep learning have led to mutually productive exchanges, pushing our understanding of real and artificial neural networks in sensory and cognitive systems. However, this interaction between fields is less developed in the study of motor control. In this work…

Cited by 93SourceScholar
2019

Emergent Coordination Through Competition

ICLR 2019poster

We study the emergence of cooperative behaviors in reinforcement learning agents by introducing a challenging competitive multi-agent soccer environment with continuous simulated physics. We demonstrate that decentralized, population-based training with co-play can lead to a progression in agents' b…

Cited by 186SourcePDFScholar
2019

Hierarchical Visuomotor Control of Humanoids

ICLR 2019poster

We aim to build complex humanoid agents that integrate perception, motor control, and memory. In this work, we partly factor this problem into low-level motor control from proprioception and high-level coordination of the low-level skills informed by vision. We develop an architecture capable of sur…

Cited by 124SourcePDFScholar
2019

Neural Probabilistic Motor Primitives for Humanoid Control

ICLR 2019poster

We focus on the problem of learning a single motor module that can flexibly express a range of behaviors for the control of high-dimensional physically simulated humanoids. To do this, we propose a motor architecture that has the general structure of an inverse model with a latent-variable bottlenec…

Cited by 177SourcePDFScholar
2018

Graph Networks as Learnable Physics Engines for Inference and Control

ICML 2018oral

Understanding and interacting with everyday physical scenes requires rich knowledge about the structure of the world, represented either implicitly in a value or policy function, or explicitly in a transition model. Here we introduce a new class of learnable models–based on graph networks–which impl…

Cited by 794SourcePDFScholar
2018

Reinforcement and Imitation Learning for Diverse Visuomotor Skills

RSS 2018poster

We propose a general model-free deep reinforcement learning method and apply it to robotic manipulation tasks. Our approach leverages a small amount of demonstration data to assist a reinforcement learning agent. We train end-to-end visuomotor policies to learn a direct mapping from RGB camera input…

Cited by 398SourcePDFScholar
2017

Multilayer Recurrent Network Models of Primate Retinal Ganglion Cell Responses

ICLR 2017poster

Developing accurate predictive models of sensory neurons is vital to understanding sensory processing and brain computations. The current standard approach to modeling neurons is to start with simple models and to incrementally add interpretable features. An alternative approach is to start with a m…

Cited by 93SourceScholar