Bootstrapped meta-learning – an interview with Sebastian Flennerhag

Sebastian Flennerhag, Yannick Schroecker, Tom Zahavy, Hado van Hasselt, David Silver, and Satinder Singh won an ICLR 2022 outstanding paper award for their work Bootstrapped meta-learning. We spoke to Sebastian about how the team approached the problem of meta-learning, how their algorithm performs, and plans for future work. Meta-learning, generally, is the problem of learning to learn. So what is meant by that is that when you specify a machine learning problem, you need some algorithm that does that learning. However, it's not clear which algorithm is actually the most efficient one for the specific problem that you have in mind.