One paper accepted to ICML with one paper rejected as well. It’s called balance (and measured frustration) #icml2025

Shipping a copy of Kuhn's "Structure of Scientific Revolutions" to every ICML meta-reviewer

We're putting in final planning and preparation steps this week to be ready for #ICLR2025. I'm excited to be attending, in part to help represent @mbzuai.bsky.social and @llm360.bsky.social as well as recruit Research Scientists and Engineers to our new lab in the Bay Area! (see next for more info)

I used to dream of days like this. Mowed the lawn, trimmed some hedges, pruned a few trees to let more sun into our yard, picked the rest of our orange tree (we yielded 658 🍊this year!) had the kids help clean up the branches, etc. #suburbandadsaturdays

Real-world RL for the public good! Love to see it!

A year later of a multi-agent RL controlled variable speed limit system: arxiv.org/abs/2503.01017 Fewer crashes, quicker responses, quicker warnings

Reviewing a paper right now and I'm having lots of "I wish that I'd written this!" feelings. Great sign for the authors tbh.

Congratulations Andy and Rich! You've given RL yet another place in the history books. I can't imagine how you're feeling right now, but it must be amazing to reflect on how far the ideas have come, especially after all the care and dedication you gave them. awards.acm.org/about/2024-t...

As I've started down the RL+LLM rabbit hole (for reals this time), this blog post by TensorZero is absolutely compelling. It's nice to see clear thinking conceptual framing that at once open the doors to new research but also leverages existing insights: www.tensorzero.com/blog/think-o...

Struggled to find a paper to recommend to authors that would strengthen their claims while writing a review. Used @GeminiApp and @youdotcom to no success. Reluctantly pulled up @ChatGPTapp, nailed it in the first returned result. #HesitantAboutLLMsButTryingToLearn

"Scaling laws" tries to piggyback on physics where the scaling laws are resultant from statistical limits. To call them "laws" rather than "empirical scaling curves" is real iffy

Day 1 with @mbzuai.bsky.social as we start building out a new non-profit, open research lab in the Bay Area. Lots to learn and my head is spinning but I’m excited to get started pushing the boundaries of what we know about reasoning and decision making under uncertainty.

We've built a simulated driving agent that we trained on 1.6 billion km of driving with no human data. It is SOTA on every planning benchmark we tried. In self-play, it goes 20 years between collisions.

arxiv.org/abs/2502.03349 Awesome planning results by Vladlen Koltun's new lab (@twkillian.bsky.social, @eugenevinitsky.bsky.social @senerozan.bsky.social and others) that everyone working on driving should read. Lots of details are in the Appendix.

📍Provo, Utah

This afternoon I've been putting finishing touches on a talk that I've been invited to give at my undergrad Alma Mater (BYU Math) next Tues. Since graduating, I've been hoping for an opportunity to return & share how my career has grown from the solid foundation I gained there. I'm really excited!

Last year's workshops were some of the most unique, weird, exciting ones I've ever attending from "Finding the Frame" to "RL Beyond Rewards" to "Deployable RL". I'm so excited for this year's unexpected entrants.

There's not much that is as disappointing as a scam call when you're expecting to hear from someone with a number you don't know...

My bound and published PhD thesis arrived in the mail today. It's an amazing and overwhelming feeling to hold the product of 5 years of work in my hands.

It's that time of year where reviewer invitations start piling up. I'm excited to contribute to the success of our research venues and am especially looking forward to the submissions I get the chance to review, especially those coming from @rl-conference.bsky.social!

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

Upon learning the definition of 'anarchy', our 7 y.o. thoughtfully said, "Oh, so [2 y.o. little sister] is anarchy". Truer words have possibly not been said about what parenting feels like.

As 2024 ends and I've been reflecting on the year, I will be honest saying that it's been hard in a lot of ways. However, there has been much to celebrate and be grateful for, in particular all of the people who helped me attain my greatest achievement of 2024: finishing a PhD.

@luisoala.bsky.social 🦆

I'm recruiting PhD students for Fall 2025! CS PhD Deadline: Dec. 15th. I work on safe/reliable ML and causal inference, motivated by healthcare applications. Beyond myself, Johns Hopkins has a rich community of folks doing similar work. Come join us!

Heeeeere’s Maggie! Maggie is a great ML researcher looking into connections of Causality, ML, and Healthcare. To top it off she’s an even greater human.

Medically adapted foundation models (think Med-*) turn out to be more hot air than hot stuff. Correcting for fatal flaws in evaluation, the current crop are no better on balance than generic foundation models, even on the very tasks for which benefits are claimed. arxiv.org/abs/2411.04118

RLC will be held at the Univ. of Alberta, Edmonton, in 2025. I'm happy to say that we now have the conference's website out: rl-conference.cc/index.html Looking forward to seeing you all there! @rl-conference.bsky.social #reinforcementlearning

Starter packs are great but I feel like the excitement of being followed by notable people has been subdued. Previously it may have been because they maybe thought I had something interesting to say, was qualified to do so, and thereby felt some bit of my impostor syndrome go away.

First post! I'm recruiting PhD students this PhD admission cycle who want to work on: a) impactful ML methods for healthcare 🤖, b) computational methods to improve health equity ⚖️, or c) AI for women's health or climate health 🤰🌎 Apply via UC Berkeley CPH or EECS (AI-H) 🌉. irenechen.net/join-lab/

I am recruiting graduate students for my lab @mcgillu.bsky.social for admission in Fall 2025! Get in touch if you're interested in how brain circuits implement distributed computation, including dopamine-based distributed RL and probabilistic representations.

If you're an RL researcher or RL adjacent, pipe up to make sure I've added you here! go.bsky.app/3WPHcHg

It’s been really fun seeing this platform grow and get more active this week. Waking up on Wednesday morning to see my follower counts going up helped me guess what happened with the election. It’s nice that we can re-build an ML/RL/Research community here.

Today’s #bluesky

My Bluesky this morning. Waiting for a perfect opportunity to make my first post!