Connectionists: CFP: NIPS Workshop on RL - Benchmarks and Bake-offs II

[Martin Riedmiller]

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                         FINAL CALL FOR PAPERS

                       ---- Reinforcement Learning Benchmarks and 
Bake-offs II ----

                            Workshop at the
    19th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems
                              (NIPS 2005)

               Whistler, Canada, Friday December 9, 2005

            http://www.ni.uos.de/rl_workshop05

              -- Submission Deadline: November 4th, 2005 --

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                  [ Apologies for multiple postings ]

OVERVIEW
--------

It is widely agreed that the field of reinforcement learning would
benefit from the establishment of standard benchmark problems and
perhaps regular competitive events (bake-offs).  Competitions can
greatly increase the interest and focus in an area by clarifying its
objectives and challenges, publicly acknowledging the best algorithms,
and generally making the area more exciting and enjoyable.  Standard
benchmarks can make it much easier to apply new algorithms to existing
problems and thus provide clear first steps toward their evaluation.

The workshop will be organized around two main themes.

Theme 1 will be the 1st RL benchmarking event
(see http://www.cs.rutgers.edu/~mlittman/topics/nips05-mdp)

Theme 2 will be a in-depth discussion on issues related to RL
benchmarking. Topics will include concrete proposals on how to
organize an RL benchmark competition, proposals for benchmark domains
and appropriate performance measures, and proposals for standardized
software frameworks. Potential participants are encouraged to submit
short papers (one page in length) summarizing their views and
outlining their proposal.


FORMAT
------

This is a one-day workshop that will follow the 19th Annual Conference
on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS 2005). The workshop will
consist of two 3-hour sessions.

RL Benchmarking Event
-------------

see  http://www.cs.rutgers.edu/~mlittman/topics/nips05-mdp

Contributed Talks
-----------------

These will be based on papers submitted for review. See below for
details.

CALL FOR PAPERS
---------------

We invite submissions of extended abstracts addressing all aspects of
benchmarking in RL, e.g. propositions for benchmarks, performance
measures, software, ...

An important criterion for acceptance is the public availability of
proposed benchmark problems. We are particularly interested in papers
that point to open questions and stimulate discussions.

Submission Instructions
-----------------------

Submissions should be an extended abstract of at most 1 page in length.
Email submissions (in pdf or ps format only) to martin.riedmiller at uos.de
with subject line "RL Workshop".

The deadline for submissions is Friday, November 4th.
Submissions will be reviewed by the program committee and authors will
be notified of acceptance/rejection decisions by Friday November 18th.

Please note that one author of each accepted paper must be available to
present the paper at the workshop.

IMPORTANT DATES
---------------

   Paper submission deadline   --  November 4, 2005
   Notification of decisions   --  November 18, 2005
   Workshop                    --  December  9, 2005

ORGANIZERS
----------

Martin Riedmiller (contact person), Univ. of Osnabrueck
Michael L. Littman (benchmarking event), Rutgers University
Nikos Vlassis, University of Amsterdam
Shimon Whiteson, UT Austin
Adam White, U Alberta
Michail G. Lagoudakis, Technical University of Crete


CONTACT
-------

Please direct any questions to martin.riedmiller at uos.de

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