Speaker:
Gokul Swamy
Talk Title:
Efficient Interactive Learning: Learning More From Less
Date and Location:
Tuesday, February 17, 2026
Bahen Centre for Information Technology, BA 3200
This lecture is open to the public. No registration is required, but space is limited.
The grad roundtable that follows the talk is open only to current University of Toronto Department of Computer Science graduate students.
Abstract:
Even as we near the limits of what human-generated data we can scrape from the Internet, today's decision-making agents -- from robots to large language models (LLMs) -- are still far from perfect. Thus, as we start to move past the era of simply scaling up training datasets, I believe the most pressing question in decision-making is how we can learn more from less data. In theory, agents collecting their own data and learning from this experience might allow us to transcend the limits of static datasets. However, there are two core challenges that make delivering on this promise of reinforcement learning (RL) practically challenging. The first is exploration: experiencing the right things. The second is specification: knowing if what you experienced was good or bad. My research focuses on algorithms that address both of these challenges in tandem. This talk will cover both theoretical advancements and their practical implications. First, I will discuss how we can teach robots to provably recover from their own mistakes without extensive trial-and-error exploration. Second, I will describe provably robust algorithms for training language models from conflicting preferences. Third, I will explain how RL learns more from less without having to create data ex nihilo. To conclude, I will outline what I believe are the most promising directions to enable the next generation of agents to learn even more from less.
About Gokul Swamy:
Gokul is a final-year PhD student in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He works on efficient interactive learning algorithms for training agents like robots and language models. More fundamentally, he is interested in techniques for learning to make good decisions efficiently, even when “good” is hard to specify. Gokul was named a Rising Star in Data Science and Robotics and received an Outstanding Teaching Award for his student mentorship and creation of a new reinforcement learning course. He has also spent summers at Microsoft Research and Google Research.