Ian Osband is a Research scientist at OpenAI (ex DeepMind, Stanford) working on decision making under uncertainty.

We spoke about:

- Information theory and RL

- Exploration, epistemic uncertainty and joint predictions

- Epistemic Neural Networks and scaling to LLMs

Featured References

Reinforcement Learning, Bit by Bit
Xiuyuan Lu, Benjamin Van Roy, Vikranth Dwaracherla, Morteza Ibrahimi, Ian Osband, Zheng Wen

From Predictions to Decisions: The Importance of Joint Predictive Distributions

Zheng Wen, Ian Osband, Chao Qin, Xiuyuan Lu, Morteza Ibrahimi, Vikranth Dwaracherla, Mohammad Asghari, Benjamin Van Roy

Epistemic Neural Networks

Ian Osband, Zheng Wen, Seyed Mohammad Asghari, Vikranth Dwaracherla, Morteza Ibrahimi, Xiuyuan Lu, Benjamin Van Roy

Approximate Thompson Sampling via Epistemic Neural Networks

Ian Osband, Zheng Wen, Seyed Mohammad Asghari, Vikranth Dwaracherla, Morteza Ibrahimi, Xiuyuan Lu, Benjamin Van Roy

Additional References

• Thesis defence, Ian Osband
• Homepage, Ian Osband
• Epistemic Neural Networks at Stanford RL Forum
• Behaviour Suite for Reinforcement Learning, Osband et al 2019
• Efficient Exploration for LLMs, Dwaracherla et al 2024