How to Reuse and Compose Knowledge for a Lifetime of Tasks: A Survey on Continual Learning and Functional Composition
Jorge A. Mendez, Eric Eaton. Preprint, 2022 [PDF]
CV
See the PDF version here.
Education
- Ph.D. in Computer and Information Science, University of Pennsylvania, 2022
- M.S.E. in Robotics, University of Pennsylvania, 2018
- B.S. in Eletronics Engineering, Universidad Simon Bolivar (Venezuela), 2016
Research Experience
- 2022-Present: Postdoctoral Fellow
- CSAIL, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- Topics: compositionality, planning and learning, robotics, lifelong learning
- Supervisors: Tomas Lozano-Perez and Leslie Pack Kaelbling
- Summer 2022: Postdoctoral Researcher
- GRASP Lab, University of Pennsylvania
- Topics: lifelong learning, reinforcement learning, compositionality
- Supervisor: Eric Eaton
- 2016-2022: Research Assistant
- GRASP Lab, University of Pennsylvania
- Topics: lifelong learning, reinforcement learning, compositionality
- Supervisor: Eric Eaton
- Summer 2021: Research Intern
- Facebook AI Research, NYC
- Topics: mixture of experts models
- Supervisor: Arthur Szlam and Ludovic Denoyer
- Summer 2020: Research Intern
- Microsoft Research, Montreal
- Topics: lifelong learning, reinforcement learning, compositionality
- Supervisor: Harm van Seijen
- Summer 2019: Research Intern
- Facebook AI
- Topics: conversational AI, reinforcement learning, multidomain learning
- Supervisor: Alborz Geramifard and Mohammad Ghavamzadeh
Publications
Preprints
Journal Articles
A Domain-Agnostic Approach for Characterization of Lifelong Learning Systems
Megan M. Baker, Alexander New, Mario Aguilar-Simon, Ziad Al-Halah, Sébastien M. R. Arnold, Ese Ben-Iwhiwhu,,rew P. Brna, Ethan Brooks, Ryan C. Brown, Zachary Daniels, Anurag Daram, Fabien Delattre, Ryan Dellana, Eric Eaton, Haotian Fu, Kristen Grauman, Jesse Hostetler, Shariq Iqbal, Cassandra Kent, Nicholas Ketz, Soheil Kolouri, George Konidaris, Dhireesha Kudithipudi, Erik Learned-Miller, Seungwon Lee, Michael L. Littman, Sandeep Madireddy, Jorge A. MEndez, Eric Q. Nguyen, Christine D. Piatko, Praveen K. Pilly, Aswin Raghavan, Abrar Rahman, Santhosh Kumar Ramakrishnan, Neale Ratzlaff,,rea Soltoggio, Peter Stone, Indranil Sur, Zhipeng Tang, Saket Tiwari, Kyle Vedder, Felix Wang, Zifan Xu, Angel Yanguas-Gil, Harel Yedidsion, Shangqun Yu, Gautam K. Vallabha. Neural Networks, 2023 [PDF]
Gap Minimization for Knowledge Sharing and Transfer
Boyu Wang, Jorge A. Mendez, Changjian Shui, Fan Zhou, Di Wu, Xu, Gezheng, Christian Gagne, Eric Eaton. Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR), 2023 [PDF]
Conference Papers
SHELS: Exclusive Feature Sets for Novelty Detection and Continual Learning Without Class Boundaries
Meghna Gummadi, Cassandra Kent, Jorge A. Mendez, Eric Eaton. Conference on Lifelong Learning Agents (CoLLAs), 2022 [PDF]
CompoSuite: A Compositional Reinforcement Learning Benchmark
Jorge A. Mendez*, Marcel Hussing*, Meghna Gummadi, Eric Eaton. Conference on Lifelong Learning Agents (CoLLAs), 2022 [PDF]
Modular Lifelong Reinforcement Learning via Neural Composition
Jorge A. Mendez, Harm van Seijen, Eric Eaton. International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2022 [PDF]
Lifelong Learning of Compositional Structures
Jorge A. Mendez, Eric Eaton. International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2021 [PDF]
Lifelong Policy Gradient Learning of Factored Policies for Faster Training Without Forgetting
Jorge A. Mendez, Boyu Wang, Eric Eaton. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2020 [PDF]
Transfer Learning via Minimizing the Performance Gap Between Domains
Boyu Wang, Jorge A. Mendez, Mingbo Cai, Eric Eaton. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2019 [PDF]
Lifelong Inverse Reinforcement Learning
Jorge A. Mendez, Shashank Shivkumar, Eric Eaton. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2018 [PDF]
Workshop Papers
Robotic Manipulation Datasets for Offline Compositional Reinforcement Learning
Marcel Hussing*, Jorge A. Mendez*, Cassandra Kent, Eric Eaton. CoRL 2022 Workshop on Pre-training Robot Learning, 2022 [PDF]
Reinforcement Learning of Multi-Domain Dialog Policies Via Action Embeddings
Jorge A. Mendez, Alborz Geramifard, Mohammad Ghavamzadeh, Bing Liu. 3rd Conversational AI Workshop at Neural Information Processing Systems (ConvAI-NeurIPS), 2019 [PDF]
Theses
Lifelong Machine Learning of Functionally Compositional Structures
Jorge A. Mendez. University of Pennsylvania, 2022 [PDF]
Teaching
University of Pennsylvania
Python Programming
Fall '19, Spring '20
InstructorIntroduction to Machine Learning
Fall '17
Head Teaching Assistant
Universidad Simon Bolivar
Programming I
Winter '16, Spring '14, Winter '14, Fall '14, Spring '13, Winter '13, Fall '13
Teaching AssistantElectric Circuit Analysis II
Spring '12
Teaching AssistantCalculus II
Winter '12
Teaching AssistantCalculus I
Fall '11
Teaching Assistant
Invited Talks
Lifelong Robotics Workshop at IROS
Lifelong Robot Learning via Functional Compositionality, 2022
University of Western Ontario
Creating Versatile Learning Agents Via Lifelong Compositionality, 2022
Toyota Research Institute
Creating Versatile Learning Agents Via Lifelong Compositionality, 2022
Continual AI
Lifelong Learning of Compositional Structures, 2020
Service
Conference Paper Reviewing
- ICML, International Conference on Machine Learning (2021*)
- ICLR, International Conference on Learning Representations (2021*, 2022*)
- NeurIPS, Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (2020, 2021*, 2022)
- ICRA / RA-L, International Conference on Robotics and Automation (2020, 2021, 2023)
- Conference paper co-reviewer:
- IJCAI, International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (2017, 2018, 2019)
- ICML, International Conference on Machine Learning (2018)
- NeurIPS, Neural Information Processing Systems (2018)
- AAAI, Conference on Artificial Intelligence (2019)
*Outstanding reviewer
Workshop Proposal Reviewing
- AAAI, Conference on Artificial Intelligence (2021)
Workshop Paper Reviewing
- InterNLP Workshop at NeurIPS (2022)