Arash Tavakoli
Staff Research Scientist at Riot Games
Los Angeles, California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolArash Tavakoli is a Staff Research Scientist with 11 years of experience specializing in reinforcement learning, deep learning, and multiagent systems, currently based in Los Angeles and working at Riot Games. His research advances practical RL for the "big world," with contributions on structural and temporal credit assignment, model learning under aleatoric uncertainty, and high-dimensional/multi-action problems. He combines a strong academic pedigree—a PhD in Machine Learning from Imperial College and postdoc work at the Max Planck Institute and visits with Sutton—with industry research stints at Microsoft and Shift Lab, bridging theory and real-world applications. Arash is particularly focused on model-based RL and unsupervised skill discovery for long-horizon, non-stationary tasks and is exploring applied deployments in robotics, recommender systems, and financial markets. A less obvious strength is his track record of navigating both foundational theory and engineering constraints, making his work well-suited to productionizing complex RL systems.
11 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Science (MSc), Computer Science, Master of Science (MSc), Computer Science at University of Southern CaliforniaExchange Student, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Exchange Student, Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Institute of TechnologyDoctor of Philosophy (PhD), Machine Learning, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Machine Learning at Imperial College LondonMaster of Engineering (MEng), Electrical Engineering, First-Class Honours, Master of Engineering (MEng), Electrical Engineering, First-Class Honours at University College London, U. of London
Github Skills (13)
reinforcement-learning9
deep-reinforcement-learning9
algorithms8
openai-gym8
hypergraph8
box2d8
mujoco6
openai6
act5
pybullet5
ros-driver1
ros1
sphero1
Programming languages (2)
Github contributions (5)
atavakol/action-branching-agents
Jan 2019 - Jul 2020
(AAAI 2018) Action Branching Architectures for Deep Reinforcement Learning
Contributions:4 commits, 7 pushes, 5 comments in 1 year 5 months
deep-reinforcement-learningreinforcement-learningagentsaaai
atavakol/action-hypergraph-networks
Mar 2021 - Jun 2021
(ICLR 2021) Learning to Represent Action Values as a Hypergraph on the Action Vertices
Contributions:4 commits, 2 pushes, 2 comments in 3 months
hypergraphreinforcement-learningagentsiclrdeep-reinforcement-learning
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.