Pascal Klink
Research Interests
- Reinforcement Learning
- Transfer- and Curriculum Learning
- Bayesian Inference
- Robotics and Optimal Control.
Affiliation
TU Darmstadt, Intelligent Autonomous Systems, Computer Science Department
Contact Information
pascal.klink@robot-learning.de
Room E327, Building S2|02, TU Darmstadt, Hochschulstr. 10, 64289 Darmstadt
+49-6151-16-25371
Pascal joined the Intelligent Autonomous Systems Group in May 2019 as a PhD student working on the ROBOLEAP project. He defended his PhD thesis in November 2023. In general, his research interests revolve around various aspects of reinforcement learning that, in his opinion, will be crucial to tackling challenging reinforcement learning problems - two of them being knowledge transfer and learning via curricula. He is convinced that learning systems need to be able to reuse previously acquired knowledge to speed up and bootstrap learning in new situations in order to tackle the most challenging tasks.
Before starting his PhD, Pascal completed his Bachelor's degree in Computer Science and Master's degree in Autonomous Systems at the Technische Universitaet Darmstadt. He wrote his Master's thesis on "Generalization and Transferability in Reinforcement Learning" supervised by Hany Abdulsamad, Boris Belousov and Jan Peters, where he investigated concepts from the domain of numerical continuation, parameteric programming and concurrent systems theory for the task of knowledge transfer and finally developed a method for autonomous curriculum generation for reinforcement learning problems.
Key References
Curriculum- and Transfer Learning
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- Klink, P.; Wolf, F.; Ploeger, K.; Peter, J.; Pajarinen, J. (submitted). Tracking Control for a Spherical Pendulum via Curriculum Reinforcement Learning, Submitted to the IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-Ro).
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- Klink, P.; D'Eramo, C.; Peters, J.; Pajarinen, J. (in press). On the Benefit of Optimal Transport for Curriculum Reinforcement Learning, IEEE Transaction on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (PAMI).
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- Klink, P.; Yang, H.; D'Eramo, C.; Peters, J.; Pajarinen, J. (2022). Curriculum Reinforcement Learning via Constrained Optimal Transport, International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML).
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- Klink, P.; D`Eramo, C.; Peters, J.; Pajarinen, J. (2022). Boosted Curriculum Reinforcement Learning, International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR).
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- Klink, P.; Abdulsamad, H.; Belousov, B.; D'Eramo, C.; Peters, J.; Pajarinen, J. (2021). A Probabilistic Interpretation of Self-Paced Learning with Applications to Reinforcement Learning, Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR).
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- Klink, P.; D'Eramo, C.; Peters, J.; Pajarinen, J. (2020). Self-Paced Deep Reinforcement Learning, Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS / NeurIPS).
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- Klink, P.; Abdulsamad, H.; Belousov, B.; Peters, J. (2019). Self-Paced Contextual Reinforcement Learning, Proceedings of the 3rd Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL).
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- Klink, P.; Peters, J. (2019). Measuring Similarities between Markov Decision Processes, 4th Multidisciplinary Conference on Reinforcement Learning and Decision Making (RLDM).
Approximate Bayesian Inference for Machine Learning
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- Abdulsamad, H.; Nickl, P.; Klink, P.; Peters, J. (2024). Variational Hierarchical Mixtures for Probabilistic Learning of Inverse Dynamics, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (PAMI), 46, 4, pp.1950-1963.
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- Abdulsamad, H.; Nickl, P.; Klink, P.; Peters, J. (2021). A Variational Infinite Mixture for Probabilistic Inverse Dynamics Learning, Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA).
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- Watson, J.; Lin, J. A.; Klink, P.; Peters, J. (2021). Neural Linear Models with Functional Gaussian Process Priors, 3rd Symposium on Advances in Approximate Bayesian Inference (AABI).
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- Watson, J.; Lin J. A.; Klink, P.; Pajarinen, J.; Peters, J. (2021). Latent Derivative Bayesian Last Layer Networks, Proceedings of the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS).
Tree Search
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- Dam, T.; Klink, P.; D'Eramo, C.; Peters, J.; Pajarinen, J. (2020). Generalized Mean Estimation in Monte-Carlo Tree Search, Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI).
Books
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- Belousov, B.; Abdulsamad H.; Klink, P.; Parisi, S.; Peters, J. (2021). Reinforcement Learning Algorithms: Analysis and Applications, Studies in Computational Intelligence, Springer International Publishing.