📣 There's never a "best" time to share important updates, especially after sitting on this for so long. I'm joining the faculty @brighamyoungu.bsky.social this Summer as an Assistant Professor in the CS Dept, in preparation for the coming school year. Lots of excitement and a fair bit of nerves. 🧵

Unfortunately positive feedback from students, like all positive feedback, embarrasses me and reminds me of the infinite disproportion between what I’ve given the world and what I owe it. But go ahead and send that note! most of your teachers are sane.

I had some time to reflect on my past 12 months after some long flights following #ICLR. It's been a whirlwind year where I've been lucky to visit so many beautiful places while engaging in scientific discussions. Jotted some reflections down in a blog post: twkillian.github.io/science-is-a...

This has been the README of the Github repo of my personal+academic website since I first started it. And this is my latest commit 😱...

It's our kid's spring break this week. It's been nice having yard work agents work in parallel to my coding agents.

We have the keynote speakers for RLC2026 now! Thrilled to welcome Rika Antonova, Sheila McIlraith, Marc G. Bellemare, Danijar Hafner, Balaraman Ravindran! Details: rl-conference.cc/index.html The RL community is coming together this August in Montréal, Québec, Canada. Hope you make it!

RLC is the _very_ best conference. It's always been great vibes and will continue this for the 2026 version!

It’s a real joy being a part of @lilasciences.bsky.social! The momentum inside the company is tangible, it’s nice that it’s being recognized externally as well.

Nice work by the ICML chairs ... love it. Signal boosting this to help make it known. I hope that the effect will be that reviewers will less "delegate" (sigh) reviewing to LLMs instead of spending more effort on finding watermarks.

RLC2026 Call for Workshops! We’re already live: openreview.net/group?id=rl-... Here's the opportunity to help shape the conference & spotlight your own RL focus areas. Call: rl-conference.cc/call_for_wor... Deadline: Mar 12 (AoE) And don't forget the awesome banquet :) www.cirquedusoleil.com/ludo

RLC 2026 Call for Workshop is live on OpenReview! Submission deadline: Mar 12 (AoE). Full details here: rl-conference.cc/call_for_wor... @glenberseth.bsky.social @eugenevinitsky.bsky.social @twkillian.bsky.social @schaul.bsky.social @sologen.bsky.social @audurand.bsky.social @bradknox.bsky.social

Hi RL Enthusiasts! RLC is coming to Montreal, Quebec, in the summer: Aug 16–19, 2026! Call for Papers is up now: Abstract: Mar 1 (AOE) Submission: Mar 5 (AOE) Excited to see what you’ve been up to - Submit your best work! rl-conference.cc/callforpaper... Please share widely!

RLC attendees will also enjoy the banquet featuring a theatrical dinner show by Cirque du Soleil (LUDŌ): www.cirquedusoleil.com/ludo All the more reason not to miss the chance to be part of RLC 2026!

Only ~7 days to go until the full paper deadline (Mar 5, AOE)! Wishing everyone a strong close to the submission cycle.

RLC 2026 Call for Workshops is up! This is the opportunity to bring the attention of the community to the topics that you find the most important in RL!

Check out the Call for Workshops at RLC this year. There is still nearly a month before the deadline, we are looking forward to your proposals!

Exciting news... Percepta is growing into doing critical industry transformations in Europe, and that means we're expanding to the UK! If you're an Applied AI engineer looking to work in the UK check it out: jobs.ashbyhq.com/percepta/55a...

The workshops are maybe the best part of RLC. Bring us your workshops that could never happen anywhere else!

3 weeks to get your RLC papers in shape! And to get the word out to those who have yet to experience an RLC review process.

🚀 Excited to share REPPO, a new on-policy RL agent! TL;DR: Replace PPO with REPPO for fewer hyperparameter headaches and more robust training. REPPO, led by @cvoelcker.bsky.social, will be presented at ICLR 2026. How does it work? 🧵👇

We're thrilled to share that the Call for Workshops for this year's @rl-conference.bsky.social is now live! As Workshop co-chair (alongside the wonderful Raksha Kumaraswamy and @claireve.bsky.social) we are looking forward to seeing the proposals for workshops that we receive. LINK IN NEXT POST

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.