Joey Hejna

(Donald Joseph Hejna III)

I'm a third year PhD student in the computer science department at Stanford University advised by Dorsa Sadigh. My research is supported by an NDSEG Fellowship. I completed my undergrad at UC Berkeley where I worked with Professors Pieter Abbeel and Lerrel Pinto.

jhejna @ cs.stanford.edu  /  Resume  /  Github  /  Scholar  /  LinkedIn

I'm broadly interested in learning for decision making and robotics. Papers (and preprints) are ordered by recency.

Laying the groundwork for a foundation model for robotics.

Reduces Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback to contrastive learning under the regret model of human preferences, which has recently been shown to be more accurate than the widely accepted reward model. Unlike many RLHF methods, CPL is fully off-policy and works on arbitrary MDPs.

Approaches to preference-based RL typically work in two phases: first a reward function is learned, then it is maximized using a vanilla RL algorithm. We introduce the Inverse Preference Learning framework, where we directly learn a Q-function that models the user's preferences without explicitly learning a reward function.

We introduce DWSL, an algorithm for offline goal-conditioned reinforcement learning that uses only supervised objectives while still learning a constrained optimal policy. DWSL performs particularly well on high-dimensional image domains and seems robust to hyperparamters.

We introduce a novel framework for Q-learning that models the maximal soft-values without needing to sample from a policy and improves performance in online and offline RL settings.

Pretraining preference models greatly reduces query-complexity, enabling humans to teach robots with a reasonable amount of feedback.

We show that predicting instructions along with actions drastically improves performance in combinatorially complex long-horizon imitation settings.

Better robot strucutres hold the promise of better performance. We propose a new algorithm, TAME, that is able to evolve morphologies without any task specification. This is accomplished using an information theoretic objective that efficiently ranks morphologies based on their ability to explore and control their environment.

We propose transferring RL policies across agents using a hierarchical framework. Then, to remedy poor zero-shot transfer performance we introduce two additional imitation objectives.

A lightweight framework for general deep-learning research in pytorch.

We examine and compare three methods for explicitly disentangling learned latent representations in VAE models.

• National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Scholarship (NDSEG) 2021, roughly 2% selection rate.
• Honorable mention for the 2021 CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award
• Highest Degree Honors in Engineering at UC Berkeley Spring 2021, top 3% of the graduating class.
• UC Berkeley Regents and Chancellors Scholarship
• Rambus Innovator of the Future 2017

Developed C++ systems for trading APIs and monitoring systems. Worked on optimizing memory usage of large model training.

Worked on demo systems for Intel's OpenVino model optimization system in the AWS DeepLens. Explored systems for gradient based explanations of deep networks.

Website source taken from here.