School of Computer Science and Statistics
This slot is intentionally open. If you have prior hands-on experience with reinforcement learning and an idea you’d like to pursue, whether a novel application domain for RL, or an improvement to an underlying RL algorithm, get in touch to discuss it as a potential project. Prior RL experience is mandatory for this project. This … Read more
Testing software means systematically probing it for the edge cases that break it — but RL policies don’t come with a specification to test against, and their failures often only surface deep into a long trajectory, making them hard to catch before deployment. Counterfactual explanation techniques developed in this group already show that tracing “what … Read more
Balancing competing objectives, eg speed vs. safety, or efficiency vs. fairness, is a core challenge in multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL). Prior work in my research group has shown how to optimize multiple objectives simultaneously without collapsing them into a single hand-weighted reward. But specifying the right trade-off between objectives numerically is hard: people often can’t … Read more
Recent work in my research group has shown that AI feedback can help balance competing objectives, like vehicle delay, emissions, and fairness across approaches, in traffic signal control, using preferences over individual decisions to guide reinforcement learning. However, decision-making in traffic control in sequential and long-horizon; a signal-timing choice that is suboptimal in the short-term … Read more
This idea will explore traffic signal control done by AI agents that negotiate in natural language: a vehicle requesting priority, a traffic light balancing competing demands, a neighbouring intersection protecting its own green-wave timing. This project builds the foundational system: a working prototype combining a traffic simulator (SUMO) with large language model agents that negotiate … Read more
There is a theoretical and implementational field ‘Game Theory’ (GT), originating in the 1940s, concerned with ‘games’: situations where players interact with each other and possibly some other objects in a very formalised way, gaining individual ‘pay-offs’ when the ‘game’ ends. Tic-Tac-Toe is a so-called ‘2-person zero-sum game’ and GT is concerned with what are … Read more