Kaushik
Subramanian

Publications

Automated Reward Design for Gran Turismo

NeurIPS, 2025
Michel Ma, Takuma Seno, Kaushik Subramanian, Peter R. Wurman, Peter Stone, Craig Sherstan

When designing reinforcement learning (RL) agents, a designer communicates the desired agent behavior through the definition of reward functions - numerical feedback given to the agent as reward or punishment for its actions. However, mapping desired behaviors to reward func…

A Champion-level Vision-based Reinforcement Learning Agent for Competitive Racing in Gran Turismo 7

RA-L, 2025
Hojoon Lee, Takuma Seno, Jun Jet Tai, Kaushik Subramanian, Kenta Kawamoto, Peter Stone, Peter R. Wurman

Deep reinforcement learning has achieved superhuman racing performance in high-fidelity simulators like Gran Turismo 7 (GT7). It typically utilizes global features that require instrumentation external to a car, such as precise localization of agents and opponents, limiting …

SimBa: Simplicity Bias for Scaling Up Parameters in Deep Reinforcement Learning

ICLR, 2025
Hojoon Lee, Dongyoon Hwang, Donghu Kim, Hyunseung Kim, Jun Jet Tai, Kaushik Subramanian, Peter R. Wurman, Jaegul Choo, Peter Stone, Takuma Seno

Recent advances in CV and NLP have been largely driven by scaling up the number of network parameters, despite traditional theories suggesting that larger networks are prone to overfitting. These large networks avoid overfitting by integrating components that induce a simpli…

Discovering Creative Behaviors through DUPLEX: Diverse Universal Features for Policy Exploration

NeurIPS, 2024
Borja G. Leon*, Francesco Riccio, Kaushik Subramanian, Pete Wurman, Peter Stone

The ability to approach the same problem from different angles is a cornerstone of human intelligence that leads to robust solutions and effective adaptation to problem variations. In contrast, current RL methodologies tend to lead to policies that settle on a single solutio…

A Super-human Vision-based Reinforcement Learning Agent for Autonomous Racing in Gran Turismo

RLC, 2024
Miguel Vasco*, Takuma Seno, Kenta Kawamoto, Kaushik Subramanian, Pete Wurman, Peter Stone

Racing autonomous cars faster than the best human drivers has been a longstanding grand challenge for the fields of Artificial Intelligence and robotics. Recently, an end-to-end deep reinforcement learning agent met this challenge in a high-fidelity racing simulator, Gran Tu…

Outracing Champion Gran Turismo Drivers with Deep Reinforcement Learning

Nature, 2022
Pete Wurman, Samuel Barrett, Kenta Kawamoto, James MacGlashan, Kaushik Subramanian, Thomas Walsh, Roberto Capobianco, Alisa Devlic, Franziska Eckert, Florian Fuchs, Leilani Gilpin, Piyush Khandelwal, Varun Kompella, Hao Chih Lin, Patrick MacAlpine, Declan Oller, Takuma Seno, Craig Sherstan, Michael D. Thomure, Houmehr Aghabozorgi, Leon Barrett, Rory Douglas, Dion Whitehead Amago, Peter Dürr, Peter Stone, Michael Spranger, Hiroaki Kitano

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…

Blog

August 10, 2024 | Game AI

Sony AI at the Reinforcement Learning Conference 2024

Sony AI will be participating in the Reinforcement Learning (RL) Conference in Amherst, Massachusetts, from August 9 to 12, 2024 where we will be joining some of the brightest minds in the field—and we are honored to be a part of …

Sony AI will be participating in the Reinforcement Learning (RL) Conference in Amherst, Massachusetts, from August 9 to 12, 2024 w…

January 11, 2024 | GT Sophy | Game AI

From Hypothesis to Reality: The GT Sophy Team Explains the Evolution of the Breakthrough AI Agent

Since its inception in 2020, Sony AI has been committed to enhancing human imagination and creativity through the acceleration of AI research and development. One of the first examples of this work can be found within the organiza…

Since its inception in 2020, Sony AI has been committed to enhancing human imagination and creativity through the acceleration of …

October 4, 2022 | GT Sophy | Game AI

The Race to Turn a World-class AI into a World Champion 

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…

JOIN US

Shape the Future of AI with Sony AI

We want to hear from those of you who have a strong desire
to shape the future of AI.