Biography

Matthias Rolf (PhD with highest honors, MSc) is Senior Lecturer in robotics at Oxford Brookes University, UK since 2016. He previously was Specially Appointed Researcher and Assistant Professor at Osaka University, Japan (2013-2016) and research assistant at Bielefeld University (2008-2013) where he obtained his PhD in 2012. His research interest spans robotics, machine learning, software engineering, and cognitive science, with a particular focus on developmental robotics. His work on “goal babbling” as an efficient way of sensorimotor learning lead to several research awards and international news coverages. His recent research focuses on machine learning approaches to agents’ autonomous learning of own goals.

Abstract

From Goal Babbling to Autonomous Development of Goals

How can agents learn to coordinate dozens or even hundreds of degrees of freedom of their motor apparatus? Inspiration from infant studies lead to studies investigating the role of goal-directed exploration, or goal babbling [1] which indeed allows the mastery of high dimensions and complex, bio-inspired motor systems such as bionic elephant trunks [2]. This is initially enabled by equipping an agent with a set of concrete goal representations, which leads to the question how an agent could generate such useful abstractions autonomously. I will analyze what that even means, depending on a variety of possible notions of goals [3], and demonstrate a machine learning framework that can generate goal representations from reward signals [4]. Experiments show that such abstractions can be useful in a variety of learning scenarios ranging from recommender systems to previously developed self-supervised methods of sensorimotor learning.

[1] Rolf, Matthias, Jochen J. Steil, and Michael Gienger. “Goal babbling permits direct learning of inverse kinematics.” IEEE Transactions on Autonomous Mental Development 2.3 (2010): 216-229.

[2] Rolf, Matthias, and Jochen J. Steil. “Efficient exploratory learning of inverse kinematics on a bionic elephant trunk.” IEEE transactions on neural networks and learning systems 25.6 (2014): 1147-1160.

[3] Rolf, Matthias, and Minoru Asada. “What are goals? And if so, how many?.” Development and Learning and Epigenetic Robotics (ICDL-EpiRob), 2015 Joint IEEE International Conference on. IEEE, 2015.

[4] Rolf, Matthias, and Minoru Asada. “Where do goals come from? A generic approach to autonomous goal-system development.” arXiv preprint arXiv:1410.5557 (2014)