German degrees mostly work like this!? A single exam determines your grade, enjoy

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!

🤖 Robotic manipulation tasks grow combinatorially, but data collection still scales linearly. Is there a better way to obtain expert datasets at scale?🤔 Excited to share our latest work, Iterative Compositional Data Generation for Robot Control. 📄 doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2512.10891 🧵👇

We have a new preprint out on iterative generation of compositional robot data. This work was conducted by Quan, one of the students I advised over the semester. Check out the thread! P.S. Quan is currently looking for PhD positions, keep an eye out for him!

Ah ... you have to be an American to become rich in Canada!

I'm working on a piece about peer review and conference publication in AI/ML/NLP/CV, and I need YOUR help to understand how the community uses conferences and peer review in paper discovery. Your four short multiple choice answers will help a lot :)

OK, you do still gotta build though... Which... not every city has managed ...

Hi stay, I don’t hate it! Would love to get both though? @icmlconf.bsky.social can we pick both and compare?

Honestly, can somebody tell me why I should go to work today? I have work that I have given talks on, presented at the NYC #RL workshop and yet still people insist on building on top of a weaker Berkeley baseline. I don't want to be bitter Schmidhuber, but honestly, I kinda get Youagain...

And on the last day, Disney bought the AI companies. And Disney looked at all that it had bought, and saw that it was good.

As we approach ICML/RLC/RSS I implore all #rl researchers to pause and check if they have a single baseline or core citation that was not co-authored by someone from Berkeley or Stanford. If you don’t cite your peers, who will?

Anecdotal observation: 2025 is the start of the death of ML in academia, measured by academia's own metrics! Professors without industry affiliations have stalling citation counts, while those with are booming beyond measure. This will have really interesting implications going forward.

Pretraining is like sculpting a statue by shooting a block of marble with a pellet gun 10 million times

It's very unfortunate that it's not really obvious anymore what RL benchmarks could be used to show that a new algorithm is convincing. Such is the dominance of the current frameworks and the fracturing of the benchmark landscape

The task-space conjecture: "The absolutely random selection of tasks in robot papers is just the working subset of a saner set of tasks." No, the authors didn't identify "pick eggplant" as the most interesting task, they just put objects in front of the robot, getting increasingly more desperate.

The real reason everybody uses PPO is that it is absolutely impossible to change the PPO config in isaaclab.

OK, I am confused: I absolutely still do this? Like, obviously I prep this, but my husband and I often pick new video games we are getting for Christmas, we'll make a lot of food and grab cookies and coco, and you can have a super magical Christmas morning. You just have to put in minimal effort.

Bridging the theorist-empirical divide is brutally hard because ABSOLUTLEY EVERYBODY is an arrogant prick about the other side 😂

10/10 headline, no notes

Learnings (some of them obvious): - Put other important code folders in your VS Code project. That way the model won't try to find and read the code via the command line. - Claude thinks GCRL = HER... Understandeable, but really not what I am going for. Be precise about what algorithms you need.

Watch me lose my sanity in real-time as I try to vibe code a research project from scratch. Any tips welcome. I'm using the free academic Github Copilot Pro version. I found I prefer anthropic models, so I'm testing Claude. My first command was to read a dataset and sim library and to

OK, so #reviewing has issues and now people want to deanonymize the reviewers. I'm not a fan, and it smells of a punitive impetus which is super common "Evil reviewers are bad and we need to know who to shun". Reviewers are tasked with enforcing community standards.

My lab is looking for new students who are very passionate about foundational models and planning/RL/robotics. Apply via Mila. I will also be at #NeurIPS to discuss research ideas and opportunities. See notes below for application advice.

Also, could we delay the collapse of the whole academic system until after I get a job (and possibly tenure)? It's been ... a year...

OK, I ask again, with not inconsiderable rage, who decides the PCs for conferences, and why are there no votes for the board members! @iclr-conf.bsky.social

One thing that has bothered me for a long time is how absurdly undemocratic a lot of processes in academia are. We should not be accepting conferences organized by teams of people who are chosen on completely intransparent criteria! This goes for pretty much any conference out there.

After @neuripsconf.bsky.social , @iclr-conf.bsky.social is now truly optimizing for "What can we do to make people hate ACs A LOT". There is no way adding a fresh AC and have them only guess at reviewers views will not end with a huge amount of absolutely arbitrary decisions.

This is why good Kasspatzen (vastly superior German Mac and cheese) needs to come with salad and crunchy fried onions! Very nice to have a word for it (even though I have no idea how to pronounce it)

Every damn time!

Give me fruity cocktails with sparkly umbrellas in them or give me death! To be fair, being gay is a bit of a cheatcode to toxic masculinity, you kinda lost the game anyways, gotta make up new rules...

To be fair, if one of my students stood in front of my homework assignment in “authentic wonder before the beauty of [postdoc]’s creation”, I’d recommend a thorough therapy session.

Maybe I will finally be hireable!!! Make value learning cool again :D

Generalization is a lie made up by big network

🎉 New work: “Learning Massively Multitask World Models for Continuous Control” We introduce MMBench: a 200-task RL benchmark, and Newt: a language-conditioned multitask world model trained with large-scale online RL. www.nicklashansen.com/NewtWM/ Code, checkpoints, dataset etc. are open-source!

"For you" finally knows what I want! More #dndmaps @mightofmerchants.bsky.social looks like an incredible tool

AI alignment research causes unaligned AI by writing too many lesswrong posts about how it is unaligned 😅 the solution is clear (and socially/morally good): ban lesswrong posting!

How do academic collaborators navigate the increasingly horrible embargo processes at companies like Google? Google co-authors keep telling me that projects might get placed under embargo. That feels like a huge violation of our (academics) IP rights when we collaborate on projects.

What is it with roboticists and their undying dedication to python 3.8??? It's 2025!!!

To be fair, the church was a sponsor of cutting edge arts for like 1.5 millennia, so this isn’t actually that weird if you think about it. Gothic cathedrals were the raves of the high medieval ages (don’t quote me on this, not a historian)

I'm looking for graduate students to join my group in fall 2026. We work at the intersection of Computer Vision, Deep Learning, and Robotics. The goal of our work is to create and understand organic 🍀 simulation systems, i.e., controllable data-curation engines built from real-world data. 1/n

And here is the presentation I gave on networking, self-promo, and how to make the most out of a conference. Hope this helps for everyone at NeurIPS! www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9hG...

Be the “kernel” for someone

OK, but ... neither of these names mean anything???

I might sometimes be a bit of a techno-pessimist, but nothing made me love Waymos more than sharing the street with them as a bike rider. They drive slowly, carefully, and the likelihood they go into road rage mode is ca 0. Universal self driving can’t come fast enough!

Jensen also looks like he doesn’t quite understand what’s happening though, so all good!

Has anybody gotten any author replies for @iclr-conf.bsky.social yet to their reviews? It is weirdly silent on my site.

Breaking: Vatican Head of State meets the aus admin team

Somehow (almost) all the papers I reviewed got super high scores, beating the #iclr2026 trend.

It is as if thousands of researchers suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced

LMAO, openreview down point 9pm UCT when ICLR is supposed to be releasing. Coincidence?