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.
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...
Agent-Based Markov Modeling for Improved COVID-19 Mitigation Policies
JAIR, 2021 | Roberto Capobianco, Varun Kompella, James Ault*, Guni Sharon*, Stacy Jong*, Spencer Fox*, Lauren Meyers*, Pete Wurman, Peter Stone
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...
Multiagent Epidemiologic Inference through Realtime Contact Tracing
AAMAS, 2021 | Guni Sharon*, James Ault*, Peter Stone, Varun Kompella, Roberto Capobianco
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...
Reinforcement Learning for Optimization of COVID-19 Mitigation Policies
AAAI AI FOR SOCIAL GOOD, 2020 | Varun Kompella, Roberto Capobianco, Stacy Jong*, Jonathan Browne*, Spencer Fox*, Lauren Meyers*, Pete Wurman, Peter Stone
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 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. ...
How to Train Your Race Car
July 12, 2022 | Gaming, GT Sophy, Thomas Walsh, Craig Sherstan, Varun Kompella
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: ...
The Challenge to Create a Pandemic Simulator
March 3, 2021 | Peter Stone, Life at Sony AI, Varun Kompella, Roberto Capobianco
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 ...