Transformative Insights Through First-Principles Thinking

Abhishek Naik was a student at University of Alberta and Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute, and he just finished his PhD in reinforcement learning, working with Rich Sutton.  Now he is a postdoc fellow at the National Research Council of Canada, where he does AI research on Space applications. 

Featured References 

Reinforcement Learning for Continuing Problems Using Average Reward
Abhishek Naik Ph.D. dissertation 2024 

Reward Centering
Abhishek Naik, Yi Wan, Manan Tomar, Richard S. Sutton 2024   

Learning and Planning in Average-Reward Markov Decision Processes
Yi Wan, Abhishek Naik, Richard S. Sutton 2020 

Discounted Reinforcement Learning Is Not an Optimization Problem 
Abhishek Naik, Roshan Shariff, Niko Yasui, Hengshuai Yao, Richard S. Sutton 2019  

Additional References 

• Explaining dopamine through prediction errors and beyond, Gershman et al 2024 (proposes Differential-TD-like learning mechanism in the brain around Box 4)