• Rachit Dubey


    I am a third year PhD student at Princeton where I am part of Tom Griffiths' Computational Cognitive Science Lab.

    I am interested in understanding this thing called "reward" in reinforcement learning. My research explores questions such as where do our rewards come from, how do we learn our reward functions, how do our rewards change over time, culture and generations, and importantly how can we modulate and control our own rewards.


    Email: rdubey [at] princeton (dot) edu

    Find me on: google scholar, github


    Here's a tribute written in the memory of my friend who got me started into research


    At Princeton, I am also extensively involved with the Princeton Student Climate Iniative. Feel free to get in touch if you have any ideas or want to colloborate on projects related to sustainability and fighting climate change.



  • Publications


    • Preprints


      If it's important, then I'm curious: Increasing perceived usefulness stimulates curiosity 
      Rachit Dubey, Thomas L. Griffiths, and Tania Lombrozo
      PsyArXiv preprint

      paper

      Connecting Context-specific Adaptation in Humans to Meta-learning 
      Rachit Dubey*, Erin Grant*, Michael Luo*, Karthik Narasimhan, and Thomas L. Griffiths
      arXiv preprint

      paper

      2020


      Curiosity is Contagious: A Social Influence Intervention to Induce Curiosity 
      Rachit Dubey*, Hermish Mehta*, and Tania Lombrozo
      Cognitive Science (in press)

      paper

      Understanding exploration in humans and machines by formalizing the function of curiosity 
      Rachit Dubey and Thomas L. Griffiths
      Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences

      paper

      2019


      Reconciling novelty and complexity through a rational analysis of curiosity 
      Rachit Dubey and Thomas L. Griffiths
      Psychological Review

      paper | Spotlight in Trends in Cognitive Sciences

      If it's important, then I am curious: A value intervention to induce curiosity 
      Rachit Dubey, Thomas L. Griffiths, and Tania Lombrozo
      41st Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci), 2019

      paper

      2018


      • Your liking is my curiosity: a social popularity intervention to induce curiosity 
        Hermish Mehta*, Rachit Dubey*, and Tania Lombrozo
        40th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci), 2018

        paper

        Investigating Human Priors for Playing Video Games 
        Rachit Dubey, Pulkit Agrawal, Deepak Pathak, Thomas L. Griffiths, and Alexei A. Efros
        International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2018
        paper | website | a really cool explanation of this work | media coverage

        Also presented at International Conference on Learning Representations, Workshop track (ICLR 2018)


        2017 and earlier


        • A Rational Analysis of Curiosity 
          Rachit Dubey and Thomas L. Griffiths
          39th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci), 2017
          paper


          What makes an object memorable? 
          Rachit Dubey*, Joshua Peterson*, Aditya Khosla, M.H Yang, and Bernard Ghanem
          International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2015
          paper | website


          Improving Saliency Models by Predicting Human Fixation Patches 
          Rachit Dubey, Akshat Dave and Bernard Ghanem
          12th Asian Conference on Computer Vision (ACCV), 2014
          paper


          Do humans fixate on interest points? 
          Akshat Dave*, Rachit Dubey* and Bernard Ghanem
          21st International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR 2012)
          paper


          A depth camera based fall recognition system for the elderly. 
          Rachit Dubey, Bing Bing Ni and Pierre Moulin
          Image Analysis and Recognition 2012, Springer LNCS
          paper


© 2012-Present . Rachit Dubey