This is an effort to get some discussion going.
I remember starting grad school and coming across reddit posts with themes like, “What research area will be hot in the next 10 years?”, etc. In retrospect, the comments there were not very informed (talk of graphical models and bayesian non-parametrics). But, the heart of these posts is talking about a research area that you find exciting.
So, tell us what research area is currently exciting to you. Are you starting a new job, project, or graduate program to work on it?
I am excited about continual reinforcement learning (RL). When I first learned about RL, I thought that it was too general for its own good. And yet, continual learning lies outside of the scope of current RL fundamental research. It’s an exciting time because very little is understood about how reinforcement learning methods work with neural networks on simple problems. Yet, many interesting problems require not only RL but continual learning (either because the environment is changing in some unknown way or the environment may include interaction with a human). We are still at the very early stages, but I expect there to be synergy with current developments like LLMs.