The Seeker youtube channel put out this video from Columbia University today titled How These Self-Aware Robots Are Redefining Consciousness. Seems like they’re basically rebranding model-based rl as self-modeling. I couldn’t find a full-length paper of their Task-agnostic Self-modeling Machines paper. Also no links to a full-length paper in their citation to their github for this project.

In their paper they use the term “action-sensation pair”. What does this mean? I don’t follow DRL as closely, but I don’t recall ever coming across this term and they didn’t define it here. I assume it’s a tuple of a random action and signal from the environment that corresponds to the robot’s body.

A few quotes from the paper:
“by separating the self from the task, every future experience can be used to refine a common self-model, leading to continuous self-monitoring”

What does that mean?

“As an alternative to self-modeling, many robotic systems do without a model altogether by using end-to-end training for a specific task, applying techniques such as model-free reinforcement learning (4).”

So is this just model-based DRL? Is this just more ml hype?