Couldn't think of a better excuse than #neurips2025 to visit my home town of San Diego! I'll be around 12/3-12/6 -- shoot me a DM / email if you'd like to catch up!

Our paper on algorithmic collusion was featured in a Quanta article! www.quantamagazine.org/the-game-the...

Just discovered this lovely talk from my favorite professor from undergrad, who is still as inspiring as I remember him: www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLZ0...

Please apply or help out!

Late, but arxiv.org/abs/0804.2996 is *incredible*, so many good lines (e.g., "This comes close to being an accusation of a false claim of priority for a false discovery of an untrue fact, which would be a rare triple-negative in the history of intellectual property disputes.").

Recent work has seemed somewhat magical: how can RL with *random* rewards make LLMs reason? We pull back the curtain on these claims and find out this unexpected behavior hinges on the inclusion of certain *heuristics* in the RL algorithm. Our blog post: tinyurl.com/heuristics-c...

very nice lectures, watch them from time to time

Want to learn about online learning, game solving, RL, imitation learning with applications to robotics, and RLHF with applications to language modeling? Check out this course! 👍

It was a dream come true to teach the course I wish existed at the start of my PhD. We built up the algorithmic foundations of modern-day RL, imitation learning, and RLHF, going deeper than the usual "grab bag of tricks". All 25 lectures + 150 pages of notes are now public!

Shortcut models enable scaling offline RL, both at train-time at test-time! We beat so many other algorithms on so many tasks we had to stick most of the results in the appendix 😅. Very proud of @nico-espinosa-dice.bsky.social for spearheading this project, check out his thread!

Boston friends: I'll be in the Cambridge area for the next few days, shoot me a message if you'd like to catch up :).

I won't be at #ICLR2025 myself this time around but please go talk to lead authors Nico, Zhaolin, and Runzhe about their bleeding-edge algorithms for imitation learning and RLHF!

I think of misspecification (e.g. embodiment / sensory gaps) as the fundamental reason behavioral cloning isn't "all you need" for imitation as matching actions matching outcomes. Introducing @nico-espinosa-dice.bsky.social's #ICLR2025 paper proving that "local search" *is* all you need! [1/n]

I was lucky enough to be invited give a talk on our new paper on the value of RL in fine-tuning at Cornell last week! Because of my poor time management skills, the talk isn't as polished as I'd like, but I think the "vibes" are accurate enough to share: youtu.be/E4b3cSirpsg.

1.5 yrs ago, we set out to answer a seemingly simple question: what are we *actually* getting out of RL in fine-tuning? I'm thrilled to share a pearl we found on the deepest dive of my PhD: the value of RL in RLHF seems to come from *generation-verification gaps*. Get ready to 🤿:

new h-index final boss just dropped 😭😭😭: scholar.google.com/citations?hl...

A large group of us (spearheaded by Denizalp Goktas) have put out a position paper on paths towards foundation models for strategic decision-making. Language models still lack these capabilities so we'll need to build them: hal.science/hal-04925309...

3/3 for #ICLR2025! Huge congratulations to lead authors Nico Espinosa-Dice, Zhaolin Gao, Runzhe Wu -- all students of the wonderful Wen Sun! I'll save a more in depth discussion of the papers for later but if you'd like a sneak peak, check out arxiv.org/abs/2410.13855 and arxiv.org/abs/2410.04612!

My actual favorite niche starter pack here: go.bsky.app/2Gibu1a

Lynch was perhaps my favorite director: it was like he lifted Murakami to the silver screen. His work had enough surrealism that his message stuck, but not so much that it was hidden. To quote my favorite Twin Peaks episode: "this is the water and this is the well, drink full and descend." RIP.

Congrats to my ever-amazing undergrad Juntao Ren (who is far too productive to be on here) for being named a Runner Up for the 2025 CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award (cra.org/about/awards...)! He's on the PhD Job Market this year and I can't say enough good things about him!

The more time I spend on RLHF, the more I realize the devil is in the details (even more than RL for continuous control). My co-author Zhaolin Gao wrote this excellent blog post on some of these details: huggingface.co/blog/GitBag/.... Maybe it'll be your savior!

If you're at NeurIPS, RLC is hosting an RL event from 8 till late at The Pearl on Dec. 11th. Join us, meet all the RL researchers, and spread the word!

I will present two papers at #NeurIPS2024! Happy to meet old and new friends and talk about all aspects of RL: data, environment structure, and reward! 😀 In Wed 11am-2pm poster session I will present HyPO-- best of both worlds of offline and online RLHF: neurips.cc/virtual/2024...

Excited to be at NeurIPS'24, where I'll be presenting at several workshops! Looking forward to chatting about (time series & tabular) foundation models, data science agents, or ML for healthcare! Also, I'm also on the industry job market, looking forward to connect 😁!

I won't be at #NeurIPS2024 this year but some brilliant folks I work with will be presenting some really cool work on imitation learning and RLHF. Please stop by and check out their posters! Quick links to papers: arxiv.org/abs/2406.04219, arxiv.org/abs/2406.01462, arxiv.org/abs/2404.16767.

LLM self-improvement has critical implications in synthetic data, post-training and test-time inference. To understand LLMs' true capability of self-improvement, we perform large-scale experiments with multiple families of LLMs, tasks and mechanisms. Here is what we found: (1/9)

This is a good post (the birds don't hurt either 🦜). Lately, I've been thinking a lot about how a similar principle applies in modern ML research (even in academia). I'm still not sure if this is a good thing, but it is the world we live in.

For more on SPO and related papers, see @gswamy.bsky.social 's thread posted yesterday! bsky.app/profile/gswa...

@gswamy.bsky.social et al propose SPO which builds a game from a preferences, solving for the minimax winner. Handles non-Markovian, intransitive, and stochastic preferences. Nice empirical eval ranging from small demonstrative domains to huge RL domain (Mujoco). arxiv.org/abs/2401.04056 2/3.

A dream I've had for five years is finally coming true: I'll be co-teaching a course next sem. on the algorithmic foundations of imitation learning / RLHF with my advisors, Drew Bagnell and Steven Wu! Sign up if you're at CMU (17-740) or follow along at interactive-learning-algos.github.io!