Varun
Kompella
Profile
Varun is currently a research scientist at Sony AI. He earned his master’s of science degree in informatics with a specialization in graphics, vision and robotics from Institut Nationale Polytechnique de Grenoble (INRIA Grenoble), and a Ph.D degree from Università della Svizzera Italiana (IDSIA Lugano), Switzerland, working with Prof. Juergen Schmidhuber. In his thesis work he developed algorithms that use the slowness principle for driving exploration in reinforcement learning agents. After completing his Ph.D., he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Neural Computation (INI), Germany. His research contributions led to several patents, publications in peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings.
Message
“My current focus at Sony AI is to develop algorithms to speed up learning multiple off-policy reinforcement learning tasks.”
Publications
Experience replay (ER) is a crucial component of many deep reinforcement learning (RL) systems. However, uniform sampling from an ER buffer can lead to slow convergence and unstable asymptotic behaviors. This paper introduces Stratified Sampling from Event Tables (SSET), whi…
Experience replay (ER) is a crucial component of many deep reinforcement learning (RL) systems. However, uniform sampling from an ER buffer can lead to slow convergence and unstable asymptotic behaviors. This paper introduces Stratified Sampling from Event Tables (SSET), whi…
Many potential applications of artificial intelligence involve making real-time decisions in physical systems while interacting with humans. Automobile racing represents an extreme example of these conditions; drivers must execute complex tactical manoeuvres to pass or block…
The year 2020 saw the covid-19 virus lead to one of the worst global pandemics in history. As a result, governments around the world have been faced with the challenge of protecting public health while keeping the economy running to the greatest extent possible. Epidemiologi…
This paper addresses an epidemiologic inference problem where, given realtime observation of test results, presence of symptoms,and physical contacts, the most likely infected individuals need to be inferred. The inference problem is modeled as a hidden Markovmodel where inf…
The year 2020 has seen the COVID-19 virus lead to one of the worst global pandemics in history. As a result, governments around the world are faced with the challenge of protecting public health, while keeping the economy running to the greatest extent possible. Epidemiologi…
Blog
July 12, 2022 | Gaming | GT Sophy
How to Train Your Race Car
GT SOPHY TECHNICAL SERIES Starting in 2020, the research and engineering team at Sony AI set out to do something that had never been done before: create an AI agent that could beat the best drivers in the world at the PlayStation®…
GT SOPHY TECHNICAL SERIES Starting in 2020, the research and engineering team at Sony AI set out to do something that had never be…
March 3, 2021 | Life at Sony AI
The Challenge to Create a Pandemic Simulator
The thing I like most about working at Sony AI is the quality of the projects we're working on, both for their scientific challenges and for their potential for improving the world. What could be more exciting than magnifying hu…
The thing I like most about working at Sony AI is the quality of the projects we're working on, both for their scientific challen…
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