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Paul Duckworth

9 accepted papers

2025

Metalic: Meta-Learning In-Context with Protein Language Models

ICLR 2025poster

Predicting the biophysical and functional properties of proteins is essential for in silico protein design. Machine learning has emerged as a promising technique for such prediction tasks. However, the relative scarcity of in vitro annotations means that these models often have little, or no, specif…

2024

Jumanji: a Diverse Suite of Scalable Reinforcement Learning Environments in JAX

ICLR 2024poster

Open-source reinforcement learning (RL) environments have played a crucial role in driving progress in the development of AI algorithms. In modern RL research, there is a need for simulated environments that are performant, scalable, and modular to enable their utilization in a wider range of potent…

2024

SPO: Sequential Monte Carlo Policy Optimisation

NeurIPS 2024poster

Leveraging planning during learning and decision-making is central to the long-term development of intelligent agents. Recent works have successfully combined tree-based search methods and self-play learning mechanisms to this end. However, these methods typically face scaling challenges due to the…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2024

Should we be going MAD? A Look at Multi-Agent Debate Strategies for LLMs

ICML 2024poster

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) underscore their potential for responding to inquiries in various domains. However, ensuring that generative agents provide accurate and reliable answers remains an ongoing challenge. In this context, multi-agent debate (MAD) has emerged as a promi…

2022

Bayesian Reinforcement Learning for Single-Episode Missions in Partially Unknown Environments

CoRL 2022poster

We consider planning for mobile robots conducting missions in real-world domains where a priori unknown dynamics affect the robot’s costs and transitions. We study single-episode missions where it is crucial that the robot appropriately trades off exploration and exploitation, such that the learning…

Cited by 11SourceScholar
2022

Probabilistic Planning for AUV Data Harvesting from Smart Underwater Sensor Networks

IROS 2022poster

Harvesting valuable ocean data, ranging from climate and marine life analysis to industrial equipment monitoring, is an extremely challenging real-world problem. Sparse underwater sensor networks are a promising approach to scale to larger and deeper environments, but these have difficulty offloadin…

Cited by 4SourceScholar
2021

Active Inference for Integrated State-Estimation, Control, and Learning

ICRA 2021poster

This work presents an approach for control, state-estimation and learning model (hyper)parameters for robotic manipulators. It is based on the active inference framework, prominent in computational neuroscience as a theory of the brain, where behaviour arises from minimizing variational free-energy.…

Cited by 38SourcecodeScholar
2020

Markov Decision Processes with Unknown State Feature Values for Safe Exploration using Gaussian Processes

IROS 2020poster

When exploring an unknown environment, a mobile robot must decide where to observe next. It must do this whilst minimising the risk of failure, by only exploring areas that it expects to be safe. In this context, safety refers to the robot remaining in regions where critical environment features (e.…

Cited by 28SourceScholar
2020

Time-Bounded Mission Planning in Time-Varying Domains with Semi-MDPs and Gaussian Processes

CoRL 2020

Uncertain, time-varying dynamic environments are ubiquitous in real world robotics. We propose an online planning framework to address time-bounded missions under time-varying dynamics, where those dynamics affect the duration and outcome of actions. We pose such problems as semi-Markov decision pro

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar