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Matthew Thomas Jackson

9 accepted papers

2025

A Clean Slate for Offline Reinforcement Learning

NeurIPS 2025oral

Progress in offline reinforcement learning (RL) has been impeded by ambiguous problem definitions and entangled algorithmic designs, resulting in inconsistent implementations, insufficient ablations, and unfair evaluations. Although offline RL explicitly avoids environment interaction, prior methods…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Imagined Autocurricula

NeurIPS 2025poster

Training agents to act in embodied environments typically requires vast training data or access to accurate simulation, neither of which exists for many cases in the real world. Instead, world models are emerging as an alternative–leveraging offline, passively collected data, they make it possible t…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

Adam on Local Time: Addressing Nonstationarity in RL with Relative Adam Timesteps

NeurIPS 2024poster

In reinforcement learning (RL), it is common to apply techniques used broadly in machine learning such as neural network function approximators and momentum-based optimizers. However, such tools were largely developed for supervised learning rather than nonstationary RL, leading practitioners to ad…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

Can Learned Optimization Make Reinforcement Learning Less Difficult?

NeurIPS 2024spotlight

While reinforcement learning (RL) holds great potential for decision making in the real world, it suffers from a number of unique difficulties which often need specific consideration. In particular: it is highly non-stationary; suffers from high degrees of plasticity loss; and requires exploration t…

2024

Craftax: A Lightning-Fast Benchmark for Open-Ended Reinforcement Learning

ICML 2024spotlight

Benchmarks play a crucial role in the development and analysis of reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. We identify that existing benchmarks used for research into open-ended learning fall into one of two categories. Either they are too slow for meaningful research to be performed without enormous…

2024

Discovering Temporally-Aware Reinforcement Learning Algorithms

ICLR 2024poster

Recent advancements in meta-learning have enabled the automatic discovery of novel reinforcement learning algorithms parameterized by surrogate objective functions. To improve upon manually designed algorithms, the parameterization of this learned objective function must be expressive enough to repr…

2024

Position: Near to Mid-term Risks and Opportunities of Open-Source Generative AI

ICML 2024oral

In the next few years, applications of Generative AI are expected to revolutionize a number of different areas, ranging from science & medicine to education. The potential for these seismic changes has triggered a lively debate about potential risks and resulted in calls for tighter regulation, in p…

Cited by 9SourcePDFScholar
2023

Discovering General Reinforcement Learning Algorithms with Adversarial Environment Design

NeurIPS 2023poster

The past decade has seen vast progress in deep reinforcement learning (RL) on the back of algorithms manually designed by human researchers. Recently, it has been shown that it is possible to meta-learn update rules, with the hope of discovering algorithms that can perform well on a wide range of RL…