## Summary
I have a awful memory, but its good enough most of the time, so I can remember where I left my coffee mug or when I am searching for it, where I have looked before. Imagine a person that has no recollection of what happened in their past. They might be running between room A and room B trying to find their coffee mug for ever, not realising they put it in the dishwasher.
What this person is lacking, is an episodic memory. A recollection of their, personal, previous experiences. Without them, they can only rely on what they observe and think about the world at the present moment.
Today on the Austrian Artificial Intelligence Podcast, I am talking to Fabian Paischer, PhD Student at the JKU in Linz and the ELISA PhD Program. Fabian is going to explain his research, developing an episodic memory system for reinforcement learning agents.
We will discuss his Semantic HELM paper in which they have been using pre-trained CLIP and LLM models to build an agents biography that serves the agent as an episodic memory.
How pre-trained foundation models help to build representations that generalize Reinforcement learning systems and help to understand and navigate in new environments.
This agent biography serves as a great help for the agent to solve specific memory related tasks, but in addition provides ways to interpret an agents behavior and thinking process.
I hope you enjoy this very interesting episode about current Reinforcement learning research.
## TOC
00:00:00 Beginning
00:02:08 Guest Introduction
00:07:15 Natural Language and Abstraction
00:10:37 European Ellis PhD Program
00:13:14 Episodic Memory in Reinforcement Learning
00:18:35 Symbolic State representation & Episodic Memory
00:27:04 Pre-trained Models for scene presentation
00:36:25 Semantic Helm Paper & Agent Interpretability
00:45:47 Improvements and Future research
## Sponsors
- Quantics: Supply Chain Planning for the new normal - the never normal - https://quantics.io/
- Belichberg GmbH: We do digital transformations as your innovation partner - https://belichberg.com/
## References
Fabian Paischer: https://www.jku.at/en/institute-for-machine-learning/about-us/team/fabian-paischer-msc/
Ellis PhD Program: https://ellis.eu/
SHELM Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.09312
HELM Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.12258
CLIP Explained: https://akgeni.medium.com/understanding-openai-clip-its-applications-452bd214e226
