Ask HN: What are the most promising RL fields for a new master student?
I am an incoming MSc student looking to choose a research direction in reinforcement learning. I am particularly interested in the subfields of embodied AI and BCIs. Which areas do you think currently hold the most potential?
- gessha
General advice from a CV PhD dropout:
Lean onto the interests of assistant professors at your school instead of trying to find promising RL subtopics.
This way you can get time with someone who’s deep in the field and can be a guiding light for your projects.
If you’re really into embodied AI, you can add that to an existing project but doing it by yourself can be extremely tough especially if your topic requires a lot of compute and your last name is not Rockefeller.
- Hendrikto
My advice, as somebody who has a master’s degree, is to pick a topic that you are really interested in, and that captures your imagination. You will have to dedicate yourself to this work for a considerable amount of time.
Doing a CV-driven master thesis will be miserable and more likely to fail. It should be something that is fun and captivating.
- itkovian_
Intrinsic motivation/curiosity driven exploration/novelty seeking feels like it has a breakthrough paper waiting. If someone could get those methods working for LLMs, we start getting things like move37 but in math proofs and then everything else