Highlights of NIPS 2016: Adversarial Learning, Meta-learning and more - AYLIEN

Reinforcement Learning (RL) was another much-discussed topic at NIPS with an excellent tutorial by Pieter Abbeel and John Schulman dedicated to RL. John Schulman also gave some practical advice for getting started with RL. One of the best papers of the conference introduces Value Iteration Networks, which learn to plan by providing a differentiable approximation to a classic planning algorithm via a CNN. This paper was another cool example of one of the major benefits of deep neural networks: They allow us to learn increasingly complex behaviour as long as we can represent it in a differentiable way. During the week of the conference, several research environments for RL were simultaneously released, among them OpenAI's Universe, Deep Mind Lab, and FAIR's Torchcraft. These will likely be a key driver in future RL research and should open up new research opportunities.