Samuel Barrett
Profile
Samuel joined Sony AI in 2019 as a senior research scientist, when Sony AI acquired Cogitai. He previously worked at Amazon Robotics using AI to improve the performance of the robotics system inside Amazon's warehouses. He received his Ph.D. thesis at the University of Texas at Austin in October 2014. His dissertation examined the problem of ad hoc teamwork and cooperating with unknown teammates by exploiting previously learned knowledge. In addition, he helped the UT Austin Villa team win the 2012 international RoboCup competition in the standard platform league (SPL). Before joining UT, Sam received his B.S. in computer science from Stevens Institute of Technology in May 2008.
Publications
Event Tables for Efficient Experience Replay
COLLAS, 2023 | Varun Kompella, Thomas Walsh, Samuel Barrett, Peter R. Wurman, Peter Stone
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...
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 Posts
Event Tables for Efficient Experience Replay
December 14, 2023 | Peter Stone, Pete Wurman, Game AI, GT Sophy, Thomas Walsh, Samuel Barrett, Varun Kompella
Each of us carries a core set of experiences, events that stand out as particularly important and have shaped our lives more than an average day. ...
Meet the Team #5: Craig, Piyush, and Samuel
May 30, 2022 | Life at Sony AI, Samuel Barrett, Craig Sherstan, Piyush Khandelwal
The fifth installment of our Meet the Team series features members of the global Sony AI team who contributed to the groundbreaking research, ...