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Riley Simmons-Edler

5 accepted papers

2025

Deep RL Needs Deep Behavior Analysis: Exploring Implicit Planning by Model-Free Agents in Open-Ended Environments

NeurIPS 2025poster

Understanding the behavior of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) agents—particularly as task and agent sophistication increase—requires more than simple comparison of reward curves, yet standard methods for behavioral analysis remain underdeveloped in DRL. We apply tools from neuroscience and etholog…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Military AI Needs Technically-Informed Regulation to Safeguard AI Research and its Applications

NeurIPS 2025poster

Military weapon systems and command-and-control infrastructure augmented by artificial intelligence (AI) have seen rapid development and deployment in recent years. However, the sociotechnical impacts of AI on combat systems, military decision-making, and the norms of warfare have been understudied…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

Position: AI-Powered Autonomous Weapons Risk Geopolitical Instability and Threaten AI Research

ICML 2024oral

The recent embrace of machine learning (ML) in the development of autonomous weapons systems (AWS) creates serious risks to geopolitical stability and the free exchange of ideas in AI research. This topic has received comparatively little attention of late compared to risks stemming from superintell…

Cited by 11SourcePDFScholar
2021

AuraSense: Robot Collision Avoidance by Full Surface Proximity Detection

IROS 2021poster

Perceiving obstacles and avoiding collisions is fundamental to the safe operation of a robot system, particularly when the robot must operate in highly dynamic human environments. Proximity detection using on-robot sensors can be used to avoid or mitigate impending collisions. However, existing prox…

Cited by 15SourceScholar
2020

Reward Prediction Error as an Exploration Objective in Deep RL

IJCAI 2020poster

A major challenge in reinforcement learning is exploration, when local dithering methods such as epsilon-greedy sampling are insufficient to solve a given task. Many recent methods have proposed to intrinsically motivate an agent to seek novel states, driving the agent to discover improved reward. H…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar