What drives behavior in living organisms? And how can we design artificial agents that learn interactively? 📢 To address these, the Sensorimotor AI Journal Club is launching the "RL Debate Series"👇 w/ @elisennesh.bsky.social, @noreward4u.bsky.social, @tommasosalvatori.bsky.social 🧵[1/5] 🧠🤖🧠📈

First time seeing a wild giraffe. Just chillin’ on the side of the road.

They say don’t meet your heroes, but I traveled to South Africa and met mine and it was worth it. Stoffel the Honey Badger became a major inspiration for my PhD thesis when my advisor showed our lab a BBC show on clever animals who can solve long horizon tasks, presumably for abstract reasons.

I've been thinking recently about Bostrom's notion of instrumental convergence, and what would entail instrumental divergence. There's an obvious sense in which infinitely large time horizons and infinitely small relevant probabilities play a role in washing out potential differences.

Unfortunately for SlipFrosty, a theory of instrumental intelligence is inseparable from a theory of normative intelligence. Abolish the value function!

My favorite interview from the past year, of philosopher Pete Wolfendale. Recommended to anyone interested in AI, the relationship between value, aesthetics and ethics, or anyone who wants a reason to abandon "rationality as Bayes + Utility". www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xMc...

IMO, A problem with RL is that, in sparse-reward problems, value functions don’t have a general decomposition over high-dimensional transition kernels so people are trying to learn neural-net approximations to difficult-to-generalize functions from a lot of experience. Fun ep.

Stellar new work lead by the inimitable James Whittington in Neuron that develops a new theory unifying episodic and working memory and explains diverse hippocampal and prefrontal data: www.cell.com/neuron/fullt... w/Will Dorrell, @behrenstimb.bsky.social Mohamedy El Gaby

Starter packs are making it easier to keep constructing niches, so I made this one for people broadly interested in intrinsic motivation, with some focus on RL, neuroscience and cognitive science. Haven’t found many people on Bluesky that I wanted to add here, so help me out! go.bsky.app/TPNrnpE

I wish we could turn some of the starter-packs into a custom feed rather than following everyone.

BSKY academics, lets get to know each other! Quote this & tell me: 1) a project you are working on & 2) an odd idea/theory you aren’t working on but keep thinking about 1. High-dim planning 2. What are the minimal requirements for two agents to recognize each other as acting on behalf of reasons.

The concept of system state is fundamental in theories of control and computation. I wrote down a few thoughts on the history of this idea and its connections to rationalist and empiricist perspectives in philosophy.

Coming over from twitter, please give me a follow! My thesis below is on the connection between compositional planning and intrinsic motivation for self-preserving agents 🙂 drive.google.com/file/d/1peG7...