Abdeslam Boularias

Hi, my name is Abdeslam Boularias. I am a research scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Tübingen. I am part of the robot learning lab of Prof. Jan Peters, in the Empirical Inference department led by Prof. Bernhard Schölkopf. From January 2006 to July 2010, I was a PhD student at Laval University under the supervision of Prof. Brahim Chaib-draa. My thesis focused on planning under uncertainty, reinforcement learning, imitation learning, and multi-agent systems. My current research interests focus on reinforcement learning techniques for robotics. Here is my CV in PDF.

Contact Information

Address: Abdeslam Boularias

             Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems

             Spemannstrasse 38  

             72076 Tübingen, Germany

Email: boularias@tuebingen.mpg.de

Phone: +49-7071-601-562

Fax: +49-7071-601-552

News

• June 2013: I am co-organizing with Francesco Dinuzzo and Lennart Ljung a workshop at ICML on Machine Learning for System Identification.
• Fall 2012: I am co-teaching with Jan Peters a course on autonomous intelligent systems (Autonome Lernsysteme) at TU Darmstadt.
• Summer 2012: I am co-teaching with Jan Peters a course on robot learning at TU Darmstadt.
• July 2011: I organized a workshop at ICML on the New Developments in Imitation Learning.

Referred Journal and Conference Papers

• Abdeslam Boularias and Brahim Chaib-draa (2012). "Apprenticeship Learning with Few Examples". To appear in Neurocomputing , 2012.[PDF]
• Abdeslam Boularias, Oliver Kroemer and Jan Peters (2012). "Algorithms for Learning Markov Field Policies". In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 26 (NIPS'12), Lake Tahoe, NV, USA, 2012.[PDF][poster (PDF)]
• Samory Kpotufe and Abdeslam Boularias (2012). "Gradient Weights help Nonparametric Regressors". In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 26 (NIPS'12), Lake Tahoe, NV, USA, 2012.[PDF][poster (PDF)]
• Abdeslam Boularias, Oliver Kroemer and Jan Peters (2012). "Structured Apprenticeship Learning". In Proceedings of the European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECML PKDD'12), Bristol, UK, 2012.[PDF]
• Yu Nishiyama, Abdeslam Boularias, Arthur Gretton and Kenji Fukumizu (2012). "Hilbert Space Embeddings of POMDPs". In Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI'12), Catalina, CA, USA, 2012.[PDF][poster (PDF)]
• Abdeslam Boularias, Oliver Kroemer and Jan Peters (2011). "Learning Robot Grasping from 3-D Images with Markov Random Fields". In Proceedings of the 2011 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS'11), San Francisco, CA, USA, 2011.[PDF][video]
• Zhikun Wang, Abdeslam Boularias, Katharina Muelling and Jan Peters (2011). "Balancing Safety and Exploitability in Opponent Modeling". In Proceedings of the Twenty-Fourth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI'11), San Francisco, CA, USA, 2011.[PDF]
• Abdeslam Boularias, Jens Kober and Jan Peters (2011). "Relative Entropy Inverse Reinforcement Learning". In Proceedings of the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS'11), Fort Lauderdale, FL, USA, 2011. Volume 15 of JMLR: W&CP 15.[PDF][poster (PDF)]
• Abdeslam Boularias and Brahim Chaib-draa (2010). "Bootstrapping Apprenticeship Learning". In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 24 (NIPS'10), Vancouver, Canada, 2010.[PDF][poster (PDF)]
• Abdeslam Boularias and Brahim Chaib-draa (2010). "Apprenticeship Learning via Soft Local Homomorphisms". In Proceedings of 2010 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA'10), Anchorage, USA, 2010.[PDF]
• Abdeslam Boularias and Brahim Chaib-draa (2009). "Predictive Representations for Policy Gradient in POMDPs". In Proceedings of the Twenty-sixth International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML'09), Montreal, Canada, 2009.[PDF][poster (PDF)]
• Abdeslam Boularias and Brahim Chaib-draa (2008). "Exact Dynamic Programming for Decentralized POMDPs with Lossless Policy Compression". In Proceedings of the International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS'08), Sydney, Australia, 2008.[PDF][poster (PDF)]
• Abdeslam Boularias, Masoumeh Izadi and Brahim Chaib-draa (2008). "Prediction-directed Compression of POMDPs". In Proceedings of the International Conference on Machine Learning and Applications (ICMLA'08), San Diego, CA, USA, 2008.[PDF]
• Abdeslam Boularias (2008). " A Predictive Model for Imitation Learning in Partially Observable Environments". In Proceedings of the International Conference on Machine Learning and Applications (ICMLA'08), San Diego, CA, USA, 2008.[PDF]
• Abdeslam Boularias, Masoumeh Izadi and Brahim Chaib-draa (2008). "State Space Compression with Predictive Representations". In Proceedings of 21st International Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society Conference (FLAIRS'08), Coconut Grove, FL, USA, 2008.[PDF]
• Andriy Burkov, Abdeslam Boularias and Brahim Chaib-draa (2007). "Competition and Coordination in Stochastic Games". In Proceedings of the 2007 Twentieth Canadian Conference on Artificial Intelligence (Canadian AI'07), Montreal, Canada, May 28-30, 2007.[PDF]

Referred Workshop Papers

• Yu Nishiyama, Abdeslam Boularias, Arthur Gretton and Kenji Fukumizu (2012). "Kernel Bellman Equations in POMDPs". In Proceedings of the Technical Committee on Infomation-Based Induction Sciences and Machine Learning (IBISML'12), Tokyo, Japan, 2012.
• Abdeslam Boularias, Oliver Kroemer and Jan Peters (2012). "Structured Apprenticeship Learning". In The 10th European Workshop on Reinforcement Learning (EWRL'12), Edinburgh, UK, 2012.[PDF]
• Abdeslam Boularias, Hamid R. Chinaei and Brahim Chaib-draa (2010). "Learning the Reward Model of Dialogue POMDPs". In NIPS'10 Workshop on Machine Learning for Assistive Technology (MLAT-2010) , Whistler, Canada, 2010.[PDF]
• Abdeslam Boularias and Brahim Chaib-draa (2009). "Policy Transfer in Apprenticeship Learning". In NIPS'09 Workshop on Transfer Learning for Structured Data , Whistler, Canada, 2009.[poster (PDF)]
• Abdeslam Boularias and Brahim Chaib-draa (2009). "Learning Probabilistic Models via Bayesian Inverse Planning". In NIPS'09 Workshop on Probabilistic Approaches for Robotics and Control , Whistler, Canada, 2009.[poster (PDF)]
• Abdeslam Boularias and Brahim Chaib-draa (2008). "Planning in Decentralized POMDPs with Predictive Policy Representations". In Proceedings of ICAPS'08 Multiagent Planning Workshop (MASPLAN'08), Sydney, Australia, 2008.[PDF]
• Abdeslam Boularias and Brahim Chaib-draa (2007). "Les Représentations Prédictives des États et des Politiques". In Actes des Quatrièmes Journées Francophones Modèles Formels de l'Interaction (MFI'07), Paris, France, May 30-June 1, 2007.[PDF]

Thesis

• Abdeslam Boularias. "Predictive Representations For Sequential Decision Making Under Uncertainty". PhD Thesis. July 2010.[PDF] [ Presentation slides (PDF)]