Michael Matthews

Michael Matthews

PhD Student

University of Oxford

Biography

I am a second year PhD student at the University of Oxford studying reinforcement learning in open-ended settings. I am supervised by Dr. Jakob Foerster as part of FLAIR.

I completed my MSc in Machine Learning at University College London, where I worked on transfer learning in RL at UCL DARK Lab under the supervision of Prof. Tim Rocktäschel and Prof. Edward Grefenstette. Before this, I obtained my BA in Computer Science from the University of Cambridge.

Before starting my PhD I worked for 2 years as a Machine Learning Researcher at VivaCity, where I worked on using RL for traffic control. During my undergrad I completed software engineering internships at G-Research and PlayFusion, where I worked on internal trading software and RL for video games.

Interests
  • Open-Endedness
  • Reinforcement Learning
  • Exploration
Education
  • DPhil Engineering Science, 2027

    University of Oxford

  • MSc Machine Learning, 2021

    University College London

  • BA Computer Science, 2020

    University of Cambridge

Publications

(2024). Craftax: A Lightning-Fast Benchmark for Open-Ended Reinforcement Learning. ICML 2024 (Spotlight).

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(2024). Policy-Guided Diffusion. RLC 2024.

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(2024). Refining Minimax Regret for Unsupervised Environment Design. ICML 2024.

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(2022). Hierarchical Kickstarting for Skill Transfer in Reinforcement Learning. CoLLAs 2022.

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