CFP: Intrinsically Motivated Open-Ended Learning Workshop at NeurIPS 2024

How do humans develop broad and flexible repertoires of knowledge and skills? How can we design autonomous lifelong learning machines with the same abilities? 

The field of Intrinsically Motivated Open-ended Learning (IMOL) explores these questions through integrating research on the motivational forces, learning architectures, and developmental and environmental constraints supporting the acquisition of open-ended repertoires of skill and knowledge. 

At this full-day in-person workshop, hosted at NeurIPS 2024, we will gather speakers from a wide diversity of scientific traditions, showcase on-going research via contributed talks and poster sessions, and provide networking opportunities for research and mentorship discussions. Invited speakers include Alison Gopnik, Kou Murayama, Romy Froemer, and more.

Learn more: https://imol-workshop.github.io/

Submission portal: https://openreview.net/group?id=NeurIPS.cc/2024/Workshop/IMOL

Important dates:

• Submission deadline: September 11 2024

• Acceptance Notification: October 14 2024

• Workshop date: December 14 or 15 2024 (TBD), in-person @NeurIPS 2024, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

Submission Formats 

We welcome two categories of submissions: 

• 4-page submissions of technical contributions, benchmarks, negative results and opinion papers.

• 1-page tiny papers (inspired by theICLR tiny paper initiative) showcasing early research ideas to foster discussion and collaboration.

Submissions should be on any topics related to the Intrinsically Motivated Open-ended Learning themes across disciplines (machine learning, cognitive sciences, philosophy, psychology, and more). Examples of relevant topics include:

• Intrinsic motivation in machines and animals,

• Autonomous open-ended learning (OEL),

• Autonomous goal generation,

• Self-supervised representation learning of states, actions, and skills,

• Hierarchical and goal-directed RL,

• Curriculum learning,

• Interplay between intrinsic and extrinsic motivations,

• Knowledge and skill transfer,

• Continual/lifelong learning,

• Open-ended development in children,

• Role of metacognitive representations and processes in open-ended learning,

• Playful exploration,

• Language and sociality in open-ended learning,

• Mitigation of risks of open-ended learning,

• Philosophical and ethical implications of IMOL.

Submission instructions:

Submissions must be made viaOpenReview. All submissions must be anonymized. Full submissions may be up to 4 pages long (excluding references and appendices) and use theNeurIPS 2024 LaTeX template. Tiny papers should be a single page (excluding references and appendices), using the same template. Appendices can be added to the main PDF. Each paper will receive two reviews, and all reviews will be double-anonymized. 

Full submissions should report original research, develop novel environments or benchmarks, highlight meaningful negative results, or provide opinions and synthesis of previous works. Authors can submit concise versions of parallel submissions to other conferences such as the NeurIPS main conference or ICLR. We accept dual submission but discourage submitting to multiple NeurIPS workshops.

All accepted papers will be available on the workshop website, but no formal workshop proceedings will be published.

For any questions, email us [email protected] or reach us on Twitter at https://twitter.com/IMOLNeurIPS2024!