Discussion

First Seed Papers

There are 2 options for seed papers to discuss for the first discussion:

1. Imitation Learning as f-Divergence Minimization
2. Diffusion Policy: Visuomotor Policy Learning via Action Diffusion

Task

We want this discussion to give you an opportunity to practice coming up with new research ideas and scoping/defending them. For this assignment, we will give you options for seed papers. Building on whichever seed paper you picked, your assignment is to come up with a new idea that could plausibly be spun out into a new research paper. Don’t worry if it’s not perfect, it’s meant to be a learning exercise :)

The process of defining a new research idea requires you to

1. Read and understand the seed paper
2. Find ways to improve upon it
3. Scope the related work around this
4. Think of how to theoretically or empirically validate success
5. Communicate the idea clearly and explain why it matters.

For the presentation, each group should come up with and present a 20 minute presentation + 5/7 for questions/discussion.

Aim to have your presentation cover the following sections:

• Motivation - tell us why this matters and what problem it solves in prior work
• Technical Idea - whats the core insight and algorithmic/technical insight
• Experiments - how would you validate this?
• Related Work - where does this place in the broader literature
• Potential Risks - how would you bake in risk mitigation into your project plan?
• Downstream Impacts - where do you see this proposed work having impact going forward?