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Michael D Dennis

12 accepted papers

2025

BAMDP Shaping: a Unified Framework for Intrinsic Motivation and Reward Shaping

ICLR 2025poster

Intrinsic motivation and reward shaping guide reinforcement learning (RL) agents by adding pseudo-rewards, which can lead to useful emergent behaviors. However, they can also encourage counterproductive exploits, e.g., fixation with noisy TV screens. Here we provide a theoretical model which anticip…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Generating Creative Chess Puzzles

NeurIPS 2025poster

While Generative AI rapidly advances in various domains, generating truly creative, aesthetic, and counter-intuitive outputs remains a challenge. This paper presents an approach to tackle these difficulties in the domain of chess puzzles. We start by benchmarking Generative AI architectures, and the…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Robust and Diverse Multi-Agent Learning via Rational Policy Gradient

NeurIPS 2025poster

Adversarial optimization algorithms that explicitly search for flaws in agents' policies have been successfully applied to finding robust and diverse policies in the context of multi-agent learning. However, the success of adversarial optimization has been largely limited to zero-sum settings becaus…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2024

Genie: Generative Interactive Environments

ICML 2024oral

We introduce Genie, the first *generative interactive environment* trained in an unsupervised manner from unlabelled Internet videos. The model can be prompted to generate an endless variety of action-controllable virtual worlds described through text, synthetic images, photographs, and even sketche…

Cited by 172SourcePDFScholar
2024

Position: Open-Endedness is Essential for Artificial Superhuman Intelligence

ICML 2024oral

In recent years there has been a tremendous surge in the general capabilities of AI systems, mainly fuelled by training foundation models on internet-scale data. Nevertheless, the creation of open-ended, ever self-improving AI remains elusive. **In this position paper, we argue that the ingredients…

Cited by 27SourcePDFScholar
2024

Refining Minimax Regret for Unsupervised Environment Design

ICML 2024poster

In unsupervised environment design, reinforcement learning agents are trained on environment configurations (levels) generated by an adversary that maximises some objective. Regret is a commonly used objective that theoretically results in a minimax regret (MMR) policy with desirable robustness guar…

2023

Adversarial Policies Beat Superhuman Go AIs

ICML 2023oral

We attack the state-of-the-art Go-playing AI system KataGo by training adversarial policies against it, achieving a >97% win rate against KataGo running at superhuman settings. Our adversaries do not win by playing Go well. Instead, they trick KataGo into making serious blunders. Our attack transfer…

Cited by 40SourcePDFScholar
2023

MAESTRO: Open-Ended Environment Design for Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

ICLR 2023poster

Open-ended learning methods that automatically generate a curriculum of increasingly challenging tasks serve as a promising avenue toward generally capable reinforcement learning agents. Existing methods adapt curricula independently over either environment parameters (in single-agent settings) or c…

Cited by 41SourcePDFScholar
2023

Who Needs to Know? Minimal Knowledge for Optimal Coordination

ICML 2023poster

To optimally coordinate with others in cooperative games, it is often crucial to have information about one’s collaborators: successful driving requires understanding which side of the road to drive on. However, not every feature of collaborators is strategically relevant: the fine-grained accelerat…

2022

Grounding Aleatoric Uncertainty for Unsupervised Environment Design

NeurIPS 2022accept

Adaptive curricula in reinforcement learning (RL) have proven effective for producing policies robust to discrepancies between the train and test environment. Recently, the Unsupervised Environment Design (UED) framework generalized RL curricula to generating sequences of entire environments, leadin…

Cited by 19SourcePDFScholar
2021

Quantifying Differences in Reward Functions

ICLR 2021spotlight

For many tasks, the reward function is inaccessible to introspection or too complex to be specified procedurally, and must instead be learned from user data. Prior work has evaluated learned reward functions by evaluating policies optimized for the learned reward. However, this method cannot disting…

2021

Replay-Guided Adversarial Environment Design

NeurIPS 2021poster

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) agents may successfully generalize to new settings if trained on an appropriately diverse set of environment and task configurations. Unsupervised Environment Design (UED) is a promising self-supervised RL paradigm, wherein the free parameters of an underspecified en…

Cited by 119SourcePDFScholar