"Canada Impact+ Research Chairs program—a new $1 billion investment that will provide Canadian institutions the opportunity to recruit top-tier international researchers with expertise in key areas ..." www.canada.ca/en/innovatio...

Thrilled to start 2026 as faculty in Psych & CS @ualberta.bsky.social + Amii.ca Fellow! 🥳 Recruiting students to develop theories of cognition in natural & artificial systems 🤖💭🧠. Find me at #NeurIPS2025 workshops (speaking coginterp.github.io/neurips2025 & organising @dataonbrainmind.bsky.social)

The Computing Science Dept. at the University of Alberta has multiple faculty job openings. Please share this broadly. We have a great environment! - CS Theory: tinyurl.com/zrh9mk69 - Network/Cyber Security: tinyurl.com/renxazzy - Robotics/CV/Graphics: tinyurl.com/ypcsfbff

The Department of Computing Science at the University of Alberta at the University of Alberta has an opening for another tenure-track faculty in robotics. Please, spread the word. I can attest to how awesome our department and @amiithinks.bsky.social are! (Official job posting coming soon.)

Ratatouille (2007)

This paper has now been accepted @neuripsconf.bsky.social ! Huge congratulations, Hon Tik (Rick) Tse and Siddarth Chandrasekar.

1/2: But there are none so frightened, or so strange in their fear, as conquerors. They conjure phantoms endlessly, terrified that their victims will someday do back what was done to them—even if, in truth, their victims couldn’t care less about such pettiness and have moved on.”

Excited to announce the RLC best paper awards! Like last year, we wanted to highlight the many excellent ways you can do research. rl-conference.cc/RLC2025Award...

Here's what our group will be presenting at RLC'25. * Invited Talks at Workshops:* Tue 10:00: The Causal RL Workshop sites.google.com/uci.edu/crlw... Tue 14:30: Inductive Biases in RL (IBRL) Workshop sites.google.com/view/ibrl-wo... Tue 15:00: Panel Discussion at IBRL Workshop

RLC starts tomorrow here in Edmonton. I couldn't be more excited! It has a fantastic roll of speakers, great papers, and workshops. And this time, it is in Edmonton 😁 @rl-conference.bsky.social is my favourite conference, and no, it is not because I am one of its organizers this year.

This was a great long-term effort from @martinklissarov.bsky.social, Akhil Bagaria, and @ray-luo.bsky.social, and it led to a great overview of the ideas behind leveraging temporal abstractions in AI. If anything, I think this is very useful resource for anyone interested in this field!

To align better with workshop acceptance dates, 𝐑𝐋𝐂 𝐢𝐬 𝐞𝐱𝐭𝐞𝐧𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐢𝐭𝐬 𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐥𝐲 𝐫𝐞𝐠𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐝𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐞 𝐭𝐨 𝐉𝐮𝐧𝐞 𝟐𝟑𝐫𝐝!

📢 I'm very excited to release AgarCL, a new evaluation platform for research in continual reinforcement learning‼️ Repo: github.com/machado-rese... Website: agarcl.github.io Preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2505.18347 Details below 👇

📢 I'm happy to share the preprint: _Reward-Aware Proto-Representations in Reinforcement Learning_ ‼️ My PhD student, Hon Tik Tse, led this work, and my MSc student, Siddarth Chandrasekar, assisted us. arxiv.org/abs/2505.16217 Basically, it's the SR with rewards. See below 👇

The list of accepted workshops at RLC is now available! I thoroughly enjoyed the RLC workshops last year, and this year, they seem to be as good as expected! That's very different from what I have been seeing in other conferences, just saying ... rl-conference.cc/accepted_wor...

Last year, RLC reminded me why I used to like going to conferences. I hadn't had that much fun in a long time. We are working hard to do the same thing this year. Like last year, we have a fantastic speaker lineup, including a Turing Award Winner 😉 rl-conference.cc

Reminder: The appendix comes before the references, is peer-reviewed, and counts towards the page limit. It can help your paper flow better while still being part of the paper. Anything you don’t want to count towards the page limit should go in the supplementary material!

I'm heading to AAAI'25 and I'll be giving two talks there ✈️ ‼️ 1. Sunday 11:15 for the New Faculty Highlights program aaai.org/conference/a... 2. Tuesday 09:00 for the Bridging the Gap Between AI Planning and RL Workshop prl-theworkshop.github.io/prl2025-aaai/ Let me know if you want to meet!

Some extra motivation for those of you in RLC deadline mode: our line-up of keynote speakers -- as all accepted papers get a talk, they may attend yours! @rl-conference.bsky.social

This 👇 And within reason, abstracts, author order/list and titles can be changed after the abstract deadline.

I'm teaching a deep RL course where I'm going over the key ideas behind deep RL (double learning, multi-step, prioritization, etc) and specific methods (DQN, PPO, SAC). A lot of this happened before 2018. What are the key deep RL papers of general interest published recently?

🚨🚨 RLC deadline has been extended by a week! Abstract deadline is Feb. 21 with a paper deadline of Feb. 28 🚨🚨. Please spread the word!

Martin led this great work, check it out. For a dinosaur like me, let me say that, in more classical RL terms, this is a demonstration of how we can effectively combine options and LLMs through programmatic policies.

I forgot to post: if you feel you have been invited to the wrong role, we have a form you can fill to request us to look at it again: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F... We need to fill in all the roles, and the higher the role, the fewer people we need, so if you are not upgraded, don't hate us 😅

You may have heard that the first round of invitations for reviewing at RLC has been sent out. That was a semi-automatic process. We certainly missed many fantastic reviewers, and we also issued invitations for the "wrong" role. Please help us improve all these aspects!

RLC call for workshops is out rl-conference.cc/callforworks...! Submissions open on Feb 3rd, deadline on March 7, with the workshops on Aug. 5th. Last year's workshops were inimitable and we @claireve.bsky.social and Josiah Hanna) look forward to your amazing proposals

We just released extensive instructions for all the reviewing roles at @rl-conference.bsky.social; ranging from SAC to TR. We are trying something different here that we believe can be better. To ensure we are open about it, we made those instructions public: rl-conference.cc/reviewinstru...

Check out #GoodreadsYearinBooks @goodreads to discover the 30 books I read in 2024! www.goodreads.com/user/year_in...

This talk by @programsynthesis.bsky.social is wonderful. Cool structured ways to search for programs and in turn interpret programs: youtu.be/UNpg05yxc3o?...

At RLC'25, every submission should have a cover page. This is something new to this year, described in the call for papers. For clarity, the program chairs wrote examples of the cover pages for the PG and DQN paper. Check it out: rl-conference.cc/submissionIn... @rl-conference.bsky.social

New starter pack of Canada CIFAR AI Chairs! Featuring leading AI researchers across the country, from British Columbia to Alberta to Ontario to Quebec. Surprised @roydanroy.bsky.social didn't beat me to this one... Too normal a pack? go.bsky.app/8T8VDW

I'm very excited to announce that the call for papers for RLC is now out! We (Adam, Phil, Andy, and @cathywu.bsky.social) were very careful when drafting it. Note there are changes from last year. A major change I'm excited about is the introduction of a Cover Page. Do read the CfP!

I'm wondering, for ICLR, what's the overlap between the papers accepted at the end and, say, the top 30% of the papers (avg. rating) *before* the rebuttal period? There will always be a story of a paper saved in the nick of time, but I can't avoid the feeling that most of this is meaningless.

Streaming Deep Reinforcement Learning Finally Works, by M. Elsayed, G. Vasan, A. R. Mahmood, is one of those papers I wish I had written 😅 This paper seems to allow us to do RL with NNs as it should have always been done. Everyone should read it! arxiv.org/abs/2410.14606

The Dept. of Computing Science at the University of Alberta is hiring! The new hires in AI will be nominated for a Canada CIFAR AI Chair. We have 3 TT positions: AI/ML/DL Theory: apps.ualberta.ca/careers/post... AI + SWE: apps.ualberta.ca/careers/post... Systems: apps.ualberta.ca/careers/post...