Andy

Disappointed with your ICLR paper being rejected? Ten years ago today, Sergey and I finished training some of the first end-to-end neutral nets for robot control 🤖 We submitted the paper to RSS on January 23, 2015. It was rejected for being "incremental" and "unlikely to have much impact" Our resubmission to NeurIPS was also rejected It now has >4,000 citations (and more importantly, end-to-end training is widely accepted!) It's also cool to think about what's changed and what's the same -- - The network was 92k parameters and trained on ~15 minutes of data - The code was a combination of matlab, caffe, ROS, a custom CUDA kernel for speed, and a low-level 20 Hz controller in C++, all talking to each other. ROS+matlab was as bad as it sounds. - We pre-trained the encoder and did inference off-board on a workstation with a larger GPU. - We were paranoid about varying lighting messing up the network, so we did all the experiments after sunset (so long nights running experiments on the robot past 3 am) Now, we have manipulation policies that are far more dextrous, far more generalizable, and maybe on the cusp of breaking into the real world. :) (the paper: arxiv.org/abs/1504.00702)