‘But bravery isn’t important now’.

from EMPIRE OF THE SUN by J.G.BALLARD

Affliation

• Ph.D. student at OIST
• Email: yuji.kngw.80s.revive [at] gmail.com

Education

• 2021-2026: Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (Ph.D.)
• 2019 - 2021: Department of General Systems Studies, The University of Tokyo (M.S. degree)
  • Received Ichiko Memorial Award
• 2017 - 2019: College of Arts and Science, The University of Tokyo (B.S. degree)
• 2015 - 2017: Human Sciences III, The University of Tokyo

Job Experiences

• 2023: Interned at stealth neurotech startup
• 2019: Interned at Preferred Networks, Tokyo

Research interests

I did evolutionary simulation of virtual creatures to get insights about the evolution of brain, particularly focusing on the reward system. From the age of early fish, reward function in our brains helped us survive in the world by providing learning signal to helpful events like food intake. I’m doing simulation where many (100~500 so far) agents learn from their innate reward functions and observing how they evolve.

I did some deep reinforcement learning stuff in my masters and undergrad.

Publications

• Evolution of Fear and Social Rewards in Prey-Predator Relationship
  • Presented at GECCO 2026 (poster)
  • Paper
• Evolution of Rewards for Food and Motor Action by Simulating Birth and Death
  • Presented at ALIFE 2024
  • Paper
  • Code
  • Demo site
• Learning Diverse Options via InfoMax Termination Critic
  • Presented at NeurIPS DeepRL Workshop 2020
  • Paper
  • Code
• Rogue-Gym: A New Challenge for Generalization in Reinforcement Learning
  • Presented at IEEE Conference on Games 2019
  • Paper
  • Environment code
  • Experiment code

Sub project?

• For evolutionary simulation with many agents, I made 2D physics simulator that works on GPU. Check phyjax2d repo.

OSS Projects

I was an active contributor of some Rust projects. I received Google Open Source Peer Bonus for my contributions to PyO3.

Links

• Github: kngwyu
• Bluesky: kngwyu

Kanji

金川 裕司 (かながわ ゆうじ)