IMOL Workshop 2022 -- Intrinsically-Motivated Open-ended Learning

[Rania Rayyes]

Dear Colleagues,

We are pleased to announce the “Fifth International Workshop on Intrinsically-Motivated Open- ended Learning (IMOL2022)”, which will be held at Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Tübingen (Germany) on April 4-6th 2022.

Following the four previous workshops, IMOL 2022 will further explore the advancements of intrinsically motivated open-ended lifelong learning. The workshop aims to be a highly interactive event with high-profile keynote presentations and the participation of an audience of about 60 people. It will foster close interaction among the participants with discussions, poster sessions, and collective round tables directed towards specific objectives.

**Participating in IMOL2022**

Participation in the workshop is free of charge but, given the specific nature of the meeting, is limited to a restricted number of people. Prospective attendees should submit either a brief statement of motivation or (preferably) an abstract to be presented as a poster or contributed talk.

The submission should be made by Feb 4th 2022 over easychair following the instructions at https://2022.imol-conf.org/

Topics of interest involve open-ended lifelong learning in autonomous agents and robots, for example:

Autonomous robot open-ended learning Architectures for open-ended learning Multi-task reinforcement learning Deep reinforcement learning Intrinsic motivations Curriculum learning Goal self-generation Open-ended development Multiple task solution and parameterized skills Neural/probabilistic representations and abstractions Goal-based skill learning Knowledge transfer and avoidance of catastrophic forgetting Compositionality and chunking Abstraction and hierarchies of goals and skills Visual planning and problem solving Mitigating risks of real-world deployment of open-ended learning systems

Important Dates:

Abstract submission: Feb 4th 2022

Conference dates: April 4-6th 2022 

**REAL@IMOL2022 a robotics competition**

IMOL2022 will also host a hands-on micro-workshop on how to participate in the REAL 2021 competition ("Robot open-Ended Autonomous Learning"). The competition, started in 2021 and ending in 2022, aims to develop a benchmark in the field of open-ended learning, and to form a community focused on comparing models able to face the several interesting challenges posed by open-ended learning.

The competition involves a simulated robot manipulating objects that: (1) first acquires sensorimotor competence in a fully autonomous way (no reward function, pre-wired knowledge on objects and actions, etc.), on the basis of mechanisms such as free exploration, curiosity, intrinsic motivations, and self-generated goals; (2) then it is tested with some ‘extrinsic goals’ to measure the quality of the autonomously acquired knowledge.

The competition is based on a fully open-source software kit that relies on a very fast 3D simulator (PyBullet) and includes a fully functioning and modifiable "baseline” robot architecture. The kit allows a handy development of your models on your computer before submitting them. The top 3 winning teams will receive prizes.

Important dates of the competition: - 23/08/2021: competition started

- 18/01/2022: hands-on presentation of the competition

- 04/04/2022: IMOL hands-on micro-workshop

- 24/06/2022: competition ends

- 12-15/09/2022: presentation of winners at ICDL 2022 (with launch of REAL 2022)

For further details, please refer to the competition website: https://eval.ai/web/challenges/challenge-page/1134/overview

The organizers of IMOL: Georg Martius Rania Rayyes Christian Gumbsch Vieri Giuliano Santucci Gianluca Baldassarre