Craig Sherstan

AI Research Scientist with 10+ years of experience specializing in Reinforcement Learning (RL) and predictive modeling. Proven track record of applying RL to gaming and robotics, including leading contributions to GT Sophy, an AI agent that outperformed human champions in Gran Turismo. Published extensively in top conferences such as NeurIPS, AAAI, and Nature. Passionate about solving real-world problems through cutting-edge AI technologies.

less than 1 minute read

At the end of August, 2025, I gave a talk at the University of Alberta. The talk was titled “Two Tales of Reward Design”.

I talked about two different projects that I’ve worked on at Sony AI.

  1. GT Sophy A reinforcement learning agent that plays Gran Turismo at a superhuman level.

  2. Value Function Decomposition for Iterative Design of Reinforcement Learning Agents By decomposing the value function into components, we can gain insight into the agent’s learning behavior and use this to improve agent design.

A guiding theme to the talk is the importance of reward design in reinforcement learning, something that has largely been ignored in the community.

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