Leibniz, looking at the universe: "Why is there something instead of nothing?" Me, looking at my Outlook calendar: same

Meet @theeimer.bsky.social, Postdoc at @unihannover.bsky.social 🇩🇪, ELLIS Member working on AutoRL, hyperparameter optimization & Reinforcement Learning evaluation. Her challenge at work: bridging #AutoML + RL and sharpening communication to make her work clear to both communities. #WomenInELLIS

A little Christmas present from and for the COSEAL community: a compilation of the best research practices and workflow recommendations in a living document: github.com/coseal/COSEA... Our goal is to improve research quality in meta-algorithmics and to give new researchers an easier start 💪

I just gave a talk (aka thinking out loud) at the BeNRL seminar about expressiveness of evaluations. I landed closer to "show people more and potentially weird things" rather than "standardize the setup"... theeimer.github.io/assets/pdf/s...

Foundation models on the AutoML podcast 2/3: are LLMs killing AutoML? It's probably not that simple. Listen for more details 😉

I fell into a hole, but made it out again with new episodes! This is part one of three of an accidental series on foundation models. The next parts will be released in October and November, so stay tuned!

Great opportunity to work with great people. Go apply!

New blog post: AI Allergy. On my increasing disgust with the AI discourse, even though I still like the technical and philosophical. And how I wish I could be excited about AI again. togelius.blogspot.com/2025/08/ai-a...

It is time

The "reproducibility crisis" in science constantly makes headlines. Repro efforts are often limited. What if you could assess reproducibility of an entire field? That's what @brunolemaitre.bsky.social et al. have done. Fly immunity is highly replicable & offers lessons for #metascience A 🧵 1/n

Need for Speed or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying About Sample Efficiency Part II of my blog series "Getting SAC to Work on a Massive Parallel Simulator" is out! I've included everything I tried that didn't work (and why Jax PPO was different from PyTorch PPO) araffin.github.io/post/tune-sa...

1/2 Offline RL has always bothered me. It promises that by exploiting offline data, an agent can learn to behave near-optimally once deployed. In real life, it breaks this promise, requiring large amount of online samples for tuning and has no guarantees of behaving safely to achieve desired goals.

📢 Only 3 Weeks to Go! The AutoML summer school (June 10-13th) is just around the corner, and there is not much time left to register! ---> www.automlschool.org <--- 👇 We added several new speakers to the program

Going to the hospital because I broke my wrist smashing the endorse button: www.understandingai.org/p/i-got-fool...

We can only presume to build machines like us once we see ourselves as machines first. Abeba Birhane (2022, p. 13) This is the core. So true.

Panel discussion on the current economic precarity of autonomous vehicle businesses. www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDG-... "We are at a really tough spot in generating flows of cash right now." 👇

After a short era in which people questioned the value of academia in ML, its value is more obvious than ever. Big labs stopped publishing the minute commercial incentives showed up and are relentlessly focused on a singular vision of scaling. Academia is a meaningful complement, bringing... 1/2

It's strange to me that the focus of many people's worry is still "superintelligence" and not the reality we're currently living where increasingly authoritarian governments wield technology oppressively. This fantastical distraction based on speculative rhetoric is increasingly harmful.

A sensible perspective on humanoids in manufacturing (TLDR: if you can make humanoids, you can probably make better, more manufacturing specific things) blog.spec.tech/p/humanoid-r...

Mark your calendars, EWRL is coming to Tübingen! 📅 When? September 17-19, 2025. More news to come soon, stay tuned!

Llama 4 was a messy release: unreleased finetunes boosting scores, rumors of training on test, released on a weekend, etc As (open) models are commoditized / competition grows, what is the role of Meta's Llama efforts in the future? Should they continue?

At least there is no need to jailbreak the model anymore 🫠 (Is there a counterpart to make it nicer 🎭?)

The school kids visiting me during this year's future day really had hard-hitting questions: "Do you still have a lot of free time?" Me, a pretty fresh and currently slightly overwhelmed PostDoc: "It's important to be good at time management. Like my colleague, maybe you should ask her."

So far, 2,135 people have responded to the poll Søren and I posted a few days ago. Of those, 94.4% replied “Yes” to being interested in officially presenting accepted @neuripsconf.bsky.social papers in Europe. (1/7)

German media I beg you one day just please go just one day without being obsessed with migration. One day. I promise it won’t kill you. You have lakes and mountains and good football and good healthcare and asparagus. You’ll be fine.

Tell them their argument might be valid with different hyperparameters

So true, Gilles. Yes, it is a pretext task, but often, when we try real tasks, we find that the problems are not those we expected. We need more people looking at relevant problems. Kiri Wagstaff said this 15 years ago arxiv.org/abs/1206.4656

We are excited to announce #FMSD: "1st Workshop on Foundation Models for Structured Data" has been accepted to #ICML 2025! Call for Papers: icml-structured-fm-workshop.github.io

I'm looking to hire a student researcher to work on an exciting project for 6 months in DeepMind Montreal. Requirements: - Full-time masters/PhD student 🧑🏾‍🎓 - Substantial expertise in multi-agent RL, ideally including publication(s) 🤖🤖 - Strong Python coding skills 🐍 Is this you? Get in touch!

Still enough time to switch back to Vancouver for this year's @neuripsconf.bsky.social ? 😬

We call for funding and support to open source players of all type, not just big tech companies.

some exciting news, ManiSkill/SAPIEN now has experimental support for MacOS for the CPU simulation and rendering. You can now do your local debugging/development on Mac. Example shown here is a Push-T policy trained on my 4090 running on my mac! try now: maniskill.readthedocs.io/en/latest/us...

Great blog (series) and great work! Both made me think about the panel at last year's ARLET workshop at ICML where I felt there was no really clear resolution of how to bring RL theory and empirical RL closer together.

A new harvard business school study showed that open-source software has crazy returns on investment. We have to work hard to build an open ecosystem for AI if we want the same to apply. Right now open models DO NOT have the same return as software, but they can. Study here: buff.ly/5xFjpvf

I think about this a lot. Thanks @behrenstimb.bsky.social for the wonderfully 90s-vibe blog full of wisdom! users.fmrib.ox.ac.uk/~behrens/Sta...

I’ve put together a short list of opportunities for early career academics willing to come to Europe: www.cvernade.com/miscellaneou... This mostly covers France and Germany for now but I’m willing to extend it. I build on @ellis.eu resources and my own knowledge of these systems.

New episode! 🌟 This one was cool to record since I don't get to talk to people applying ML all that much. Oscar has some interesting insights into what transfers from research and how relevant LLMs are to AutoML applications.

RL is so back! (well, for some of us, it never really left) awards.acm.org/about/2024-t...

First rule of applied RL research: it's not because it works that it works.

On the "geeks, mops, sociopaths" axis of AI, Lex Fridman is a mop or a sociopath, using the research community primarily to build his own personal fame. Anytime you go on his podcast, you just build into this. meaningness.com/geeks-mops-s...

Thinking back on all this I better understand the pain I feel to see science under devastating attack here. It’s not just about my livelihood or my university. It’s about my identity. And it’s about a pursuit that I see as standing along with art, literature, and music as among our highest callings.

Toronto became an AI powerhouse in large part because Geoff Hinton went there from CMU in the '80s because he was upset over the US invasion of Granada.

when did rl stop being fun?

Optuna 4.2.0 for hyperparameter optimization has been released! - gRPC Storage Proxy for Large-Scale Distributed Optimization - SMAC3: Support for New State-of-the-Art Optimization Algorithm by AutoML_org - OptunaHub Supports Benchmarks - c-TPE and Constrained GPSampler github.com/optuna/optun...

Starting the year off with some AutoRL inspiration: the autorl.org team put together our favorite papers on how to make RL work that we found in 2024 - and it's been a pretty great year! 🌟🚀 Let us know what we missed! autorl.org/blog/retrosp...

✅ Super interesting topic ✅ Great people You should absolutely apply!

TechCrunch going in hard!

We're hoping to organize a hopeful virtual event to get us to think our possible technological futures, and have a creative workshop. Stay tuned. In the mean time, read our Possible Futures Series. If you have thoughts on what you'd like to see from the event, comment below.

#NeurIPS2024 wrapped up last week. I put together a curated reading list for #DeepRL and #reinforcementlearning work. (represents my interests). Talks and workshops: third-crowd-c77.notion.site/NeurIPS2024-... Curated reading list fracturedplane.notion.site/NeurIPS2024-... #Holidayreading