Wow. The backlash to the 1X Neo announcement has been widespread and *merciless*. This may be a warning to lots of humanoids companies. All your promises don’t matter to the public if your robot looks or acts dumb. youtu.be/b_SNExtznd4?...

Why self-taught engineers often outperform michaelbastos.com/blog/why-sel... #programming #softwaredevelopment #tech #blog

🚨The Formalism-Implementation Gap in RL research🚨 Lots of progress in RL research over last 10 years, but too much performance-driven => overfitting to benchmarks (like the ALE). 1⃣ Let's advance science of RL 2⃣ Let's be explicit about how benchmarks map to formalism 1/X

🚨 New blog post alert! Modern package management for Robotics with Pixi! prefix.dev/blog/reprod... #ROS #ROSCon #ROSCon2025

What if we did a single run and declared victory

A wonderful collection of spurious correlations, correlation is not causation. link: www.tylervigen.com/spurious-cor... found via @stefanjudis.com newsletter

A good video on software refactoring and redesign (about the Audacity audio editing program)

Video recordings of CORL 2025 talks now available! Many interesting orals / keynotes / sponsor talks / early-career talks / poster spotlights. Day 1: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Use5... Day 2: www.youtube.com/watch?v=rh2o... Day 3: www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lzF...

In our little deep dive series we're now exploring how cross-compilation in the Conda ecosystem works: prefix.dev/blog/cross-c.... Back in the days, @conda-forge.org rolled this out widely to support osx-arm64 early on, and now for linux-aarch64/ppc64le.

Rapid RL experimentation is great. But how do you catch silent errors before they slip by? In this post, I share tools and habits that help me move quickly from idea to result without sacrificing reliability.

Ever since I made a video about Fourier Transforms, one of the most requested topics on the channel has been its close cousin, the Laplace Transform. I've been having a lot of fun animating a mini-series about this topic, and the main part is now out. youtu.be/j0wJBEZdwLs

Updated & turned my Big LLM Architecture Comparison article into a video lecture. The 11 LLM archs covered in this video: 1. DeepSeek V3/R1 2. OLMo 2 3. Gemma 3 4. Mistral Small 3.1 5. Llama 4 6. Qwen3 7. SmolLM3 8. Kimi 2 9. GPT-OSS 10. Grok 2.5 11. GLM-4.5/4.6 www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNlU...

Mjlab Isaac Lab API, powered by MuJoCo-Warp, for RL and robotics research. github.com/mujocolab/mj...

SBX (SB3 Jax) v0.23.0 is out =)! I added CNN support for PPO. It turns out that using a shared features extractor (CNN in this case) is important for achieving good performance on Atari games. Perf report: wandb.ai/openrlbenchm... github.com/araffin/sbx

Training a small humanoid robot with reinforcement learning using another robot for reset. by Kaizhe Hu et al. (ToddlerBot Stanford) Project page: robot-trains-robot.github.io

Open-Source Hardware in the Era of Robot Learning Workshop @ CoRL 2025 Website: open-hardware-robots.github.io/CoRL2025/

The CoRL 2025 workshop on Open-Source Hardware in the Era of Robot Learning is starting now! You can join the conversation online via live streaming: https://www.youtube.com/live/ZVPIJzF1df4

📣 Call for Blog Posts at #ICLR2026 @iclr_conf Following the success of the past iterations, we are opening the Call for Blog Posts 2026! iclr-blogposts.github.io/2026/about/#... Please retweet!

A practical introduction to (deep) RL, providing intuitions to understand the more recent algorithms. The plan is to start from tabular Q-learning and work our way up to Deep Q-learning (DQN). In a following post, I will continue on to Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) and its extensions.

Next Saturday, 𝗔𝗻𝘁𝗼𝗶𝗻𝗲 𝗣𝗶𝗿𝗿𝗼𝗻𝗲 will present Pollen Robotics & Hugging Face's open-source robots, including Reachy Mini, the SO-100 arm, the Amazing Hand and the Open Duck Mini. He will discuss the sim2real challenges of making the Open Duck Mini walk, and how […] [Original post on fosstodon.org]

RL102: From Tabular Q-Learning to Deep Q-Learning (DQN) - A Practical Introduction to (Deep) Reinforcement Learning araffin.github.io/post/rl102/

Package building with Pixi is being rolled out! Dive into our latest blog post on crafting C++ packages. And guess what? It’s not just for C++; Pixi plays nice with Python, Rust, ROS, Mojo, and beyond! prefix.dev/blog/pixi-b...

bash tricks permalink: wizardzines.com/comics/bash-... from our zine "Bite Size Command Line": wizardzines.com/zines/bite-s...

This is absolutely true -- this is a superb and much-needed consolidation of so much of modern RL. Kevin, inquiring minds want to understand the process you use to put this artwork together! @sirbayes.bsky.social Perhaps this is also the ultimate benchmark for Gemini Deep Research reports. ;-p

Weekend project: building a (site) search engine www.redblobgames.com/blog/2025-08... just for fun! :)

NeurIPS has decided to do what ICLR did: As a SAC I received the message 👇 This is wrong! If the review process cannot handle so many papers, the conference needs yo split instead of arbitrarily rejecting 400 papers.

Where do some of Reinforcement Learning's great thinkers stand today? Find out! Keynotes of the RL Conference are online: www.youtube.com/playlist?lis... Wanting vs liking, Agent factories, Theoretical limit of LLMs, Pluralist value, RL teachers, Knowledge flywheels (guess who talked about which!)

How astronauts control robots from space (featuring our quadruped Bert 👀) youtu.be/BMFPVCu16SQ

This one's been a long time coming. In this post on Decisions & Dragons I answer "Should we abandon RL?" The answer is obviously no, but people ask because they have a fundamental misunderstanding of what RL is. RL is a problem, not an approach. www.decisionsanddragons.com/posts/should...

📣Registration for EWRL is now open📣 Register now 👇 and join us in Tübingen for 3 days (17th-19th September) full of inspiring talks, posters and many social activities to push the boundaries of the RL community!

If machine learning is a game, it’s Calvinball. Bitter lessons from chess don’t apply.

Join us for the 𝗖𝗼𝗥𝗟 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟱 𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸𝘀𝗵𝗼𝗽 𝗼𝗻 𝗢𝗽𝗲𝗻-𝗦𝗼𝘂𝗿𝗰𝗲 𝗛𝗮𝗿𝗱𝘄𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗘𝗿𝗮 𝗼𝗳 𝗥𝗼𝗯𝗼𝘁 𝗟𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴! The day will bring together researchers and makers from both academia and the industry to discuss open-source robot design, integration with reinforcement learning […] [Original post on fosstodon.org]

Which ideas in computer science don't do better with faster computers? And what is a "human inductive bias?" (I never know what anyone means by "inductive bias." It is a term that defies definition.)

Pierre-Luc Bacon: Beyond the Gym Interface RL4RS Workshop @rl-conference.bsky.social

🚀 As we prepare for the next era of space exploration, coordinating intelligent robotic teams will be essential. Surface Avatar lays the groundwork for astronauts and robots to explore the Moon 🌙, Mars 🔴 and beyond 🌌, together 🤝 📖 Read more: blogs.esa.int/exploration/...

🤖 Meet the robots! • Interact: @esa.int's wheeled robotic arm 🦾 • Spot: @esa.int's nimble robot dog 🐕‍🦺 • Justin: @dlr-en.bsky.social's humanoid robot 🤖 • Bert: @dlr-en.bsky.social's small robot dog 🐾 Together, they’re pioneering seamless human-robot collaboration for space exploration 🚀

🤖 Imagine controlling 4 robots exploring a Mars-like landscape… from the International Space Station 💫 Last week, NASA astronaut Jonny Kim guided @esa.int and @dlr-en.bsky.social robots in the final Surface Avatar experiment, testing human-robot teamwork for future space missions 🌕🚀 🧵👇

𝗧𝗿𝗮𝗰𝗸𝗶𝗼 𝗶𝘀 𝗼𝘂𝘁! 🚀 If you've been looking for a lightweight, open-source package to use for tracking metrics, parameters, and hyperparameters, look no further! 👩‍💻 Trackio is local-first, free and open-source, and comes integrated with 🤗 Datasets and Spaces 📈 huggingface.co/blog/trackio

SB3 v2.7.0 is out, adding n-step returns for off-policy algorithms via the `n_steps` argument. ```python from stable_baselines3 import SAC # SAC with n-step returns model = SAC("MlpPolicy", "Pendulum-v1", n_steps=3, verbose=1) model.learn(10_000) ``` More info: github.com/DLR-RM/stabl...

Starting in ~20 minutes

Get ready to watch an astronaut from the ISS 🛰️ control our robots tomorrow at 13:20 (Munich Time), one of them being our favorite little happy hopper Bert =) Link: m.youtube.com/watch?v=m4Y5...

Here is an #Upkie wheeled biped getting up on its own: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZoFQhNnQ62U A combination of reinforcement learning to find an initial trajectory, manual adjustments to transfer to the real robot, and model predictive control for balancing.

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...

Robot Randomization is fun!

There are some milestones to celebrate for Stable-Baselines3 (SB3) 🎉! - 10k+ stars on @github.com - 9M+ downloads on @pypi.org - 3300+ citations for the JMLR paper - 1000 citations for the SB2 repository I would especially like to thank the maintainers and our contributors!

The Impact of On-Policy Parallelized Data Collection on Deep Reinforcement Learning Networks thrilled to share our #ICML2025 paper led by Walter Mayor & @johanobandoc.bsky.social , with Aaron Courville, where we explore how data collection affects agents in parallelized setups. 1/

proud to share a survey of state representation learning in RL that my student ayoub echchahed and i prepared, that was just published on @tmlrorg.bsky.social ! this was the bulk of ayoub's masters thesis and he put a lot of work and care into it! a few details in thread below... 1/

RL Is Hard (Episode #35753) Debugging why PPO SB3 (PyTorch) was working where PPO SBX (Jax) was failing. Just one line of code different... 🙈 (the initialization of the actor network output)

Connect with the #robotics community on Bluesky with our Robotics Starter Pack:

After hearing this a lot: "no debugger = no Zed"—we’re excited to share that Zed's Debugger has finally launched! 🎉 zed.dev/debugger