We are in this brief moment in history that 700+ new mathematical results are added to the our collective understanding of mathematics, but since no human has read them yet, no individual human's understanding has actually changed.

⏰ The deadline for our workshop workshop.oopsie-data.com on imperfect data at CoRL is nearing! ⏰ While you 🤖 are making progress on submissions, we came up with cool awards 🏆. Our workshop on imperfect data will award not only papers but also data submissions. The categories you can submit to 🥁...

TMLR has faced a deluge of submissions, necessitating stricter desk rejection policies due to limited reviewer capacity Co-EiC Nihar Shah reached out to authors of 10 papers slated for desk reject. Could they answer questions about their *own* submission? medium.com/@TmlrOrg/ask...

Asking Authors About Their Own Papers

By Nihar B. Shah

medium.com

Shana Tova!

Nice collection of historic AI-related papers and movies! - Minsky's PhD thesis, which he talks about RL (I'd heard of this; never seen!) - Turing's paper on AI - Fukushima's convolutional net - Kismet robot

Rodney Brooks@rodneyabrooks.bsky.social · last mo.

I just loaded my final report from a 1999-2004 research program, along with 73 research papers, at the bottom of the link below. We were teaching humanoids tasks using imitation and social interactions. Many historical documents from others higher on the page. people.csail.mit.edu/brooks/docum...

James R. Munkres, whom I know because of his Topology textbook, has died. May he rest connected! August 18, 1930 – July 30, 2026 www.douglassfh.com/obituary/jam...

Obituary for James R. Munkres at Douglass Funeral Home

James Raymond Munkres passed away peacefully on July 30, 2026 in Bedford, Massachusetts, just a few weeks before his 96th birthday. Jim was born August 18, 1930 to Raymond and Thelma Munkres in in Bro...

douglassfh.com

A truly compelling keynote from Sheila McIlraith at RLC 2026 today — exploring how formal language can serve as a nexus between signals and symbols for agents that learn, plan, and remember. A principled and thought-provoking perspective on the future of RL and agentic AI!

#RLC2026 Value functions didn’t need to be abandoned. They are still important for long horizon problems. 🎯 DART tracks the residual to bring them back. Presenting at RLC Tuesday at 11:40 AM B-2305 and poster in the evening. rlj.cs.umass.edu/2026/papers/...

What an incredible way to kick off RLC26! The first keynote by Marc Bellemare was amazing with a fantastic start with “Stability & Scale in Experimental RL”! Excited for the next few days? -w/ @eugenevinitsky.bsky.social @glenberseth.bsky.social @sologen.bsky.social @audurand.bsky.social

My book, Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback is done! This is the book I wish I had when learning to fine-tune, align, & now post-train models since ChatGPT. The resource has been built by me finding time to study and document the fundamentals on nights and weekends since 2024.

📚 Interested in Continual RL but not sure where to start? 👇 Dive in: sites.google.com/view/continu... ♾️ We've curated a resource hub with key papers, benchmarks, codebases, tutorials, and more to help you get up to speed quickly. #ContinualRL #ReinforcementLearning #MachineLearning #AI

This platform will not replace Twitter/X for us (scientists, researchers, profs, etc.). It might be (noticeably) better in several aspects, but (1) it is not a disruptive innovation, and (2) has the third mover disadvantage. P.S: I'll stay active here for now.

It is interesting that we still don't have a completely clear picture of why/when (Optimisitic) Policy Iteration + Monte Carlo estimate works, especially with every-visit update model (which can be biased though consistent, BTW).

🇨🇦🍁Happy Canada Day!🍁🇨🇦

🇨🇦Canadian Heroes🇨🇦

Temporal Difference Learning for Diffusion Models (ICML 2026) arxiv.org/abs/2606.15048 By Yangchen Pan (my former PhD student) and co-authors. It reformulates diffusion training as a Markov reward process and introduces a TD objective to encourage temporal consistency across denoising steps.

Temporal Difference Learning for Diffusion Models

Diffusion models are typically trained with objectives that focus on local denoising targets at individual time steps (or adjacent pairs), which do not enforce consistency between predictions along th...

arxiv.org

Sad to hear the passing of Dimitri Bertsekas (1942- 2026). His work has been very influential to me and shaped the way I think about RL. I am sure this is the case for many others in the RL, Control, and Optimization communities.

Good news, RL Community! The early registration deadline for RLC'26 has been extended to June 17th — don't miss the early rates! Register today! Full refunds for cancellations before July 14, 2026.

🚀 PhD position in #NeuroAI & neurodevelopment 🚀 Co-supervised by Sarah Lippé and myself, to investigate visual processing & cognition abnormalities in children with neurodevelopmental disorders in a neuroAI framework. Full project details and how to apply here: tinyurl.com/kbuyntpn 🧠🤖 📈

If you have a Reinforcement Learning paper accepted at TMLR, JMLR, JAIR, AIJ, or MLJ, you can use this wonderful opportunity to present your work and meet your peers at RLC in Montreal, Canada. 🇨🇦

Reinforcement Learning Conference@rl-conference.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Got a great TMLR paper but missed the RLC deadline? Following last year’s success, @RL_Conference is back with a Journal-to-Conference track! Accepted TMLR papers within scope are invited to submit for consideration. Please submit here: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

📣 There's never a "best" time to share important updates, especially after sitting on this for so long. I'm joining the faculty @brighamyoungu.bsky.social this Summer as an Assistant Professor in the CS Dept, in preparation for the coming school year. Lots of excitement and a fair bit of nerves. 🧵

Do you use often use PPO, but wish you could use something just better? Try REPPO: Relative Entropy Pathwise Policy Optimization! Project Page: cvoelcker.de/projects/rep...

Marcel Hussing@marcelhussing.bsky.social · 6mo ago

At #ICLR2026 presenting our first poster in the morning on Relative Entropy Pathwise Policy Optimization. Stop by at #4613. 🧑‍🎓 @cvoelcker.bsky.social, @axelbrunnbauer.bsky.social, Michal Naumann, Pieter Abbeel, @ericeaton.bsky.social, Radu Grosu, @sologen.bsky.social @igilitschenski.bsky.social

At #ICLR2026 presenting our first poster in the morning on Relative Entropy Pathwise Policy Optimization. Stop by at #4613. 🧑‍🎓 @cvoelcker.bsky.social, @axelbrunnbauer.bsky.social, Michal Naumann, Pieter Abbeel, @ericeaton.bsky.social, Radu Grosu, @sologen.bsky.social @igilitschenski.bsky.social

Hypothesis: People have been gradually shifting to write more like ChatGPT and alike. They use structures such as "This is not only X; but it is also Y". These struct. are natural part of lang, but either 1. they're becoming more prevalent, 2. I've become more sensitive to them.

We have a new PhD Candidate in town: @tylerkastner.bsky.social Looking forward to all the new work you will be doing on Distributional Reinforcement Learning.

We have the keynote speakers for RLC2026 now! Thrilled to welcome Rika Antonova, Sheila McIlraith, Marc G. Bellemare, Danijar Hafner, Balaraman Ravindran! Details: rl-conference.cc/index.html The RL community is coming together this August in Montréal, Québec, Canada. Hope you make it!

Palantir has student data, including immigration status, from the ed tech discussion platform Piazza. Palantir paid Piazza $916,000 for access to this data. www.sec.gov/Archives/edg... I blew the whistle on this in 2016 and the CEO contacted my employer.

Shell@risu.bsky.social · 7mo ago

Let’s also kick edtech out of schools because I promise you Palantir has that data too

Happy Norooz, the Persian new year 1405/2585, the equinox, and the beginning of spring!

Following advice by the always-wise @eugenevinitsky.bsky.social , I am trying to get back into the habit of blogging (again) ✏️! Featuring today's post: How to pick an RL algorithm for your problem cvoelcker.de/blog/2026/ch... Please share and give feedback! #reinforcementlearning

cookie monster is sitting at a table with a tray of food and the words choices written on it

Alt: cookie monster is sitting at a table with a tray of food and the words choices written on it

media.tenor.com

In light of the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, RLC decided to remove the abstract deadline: rl-conference.cc/callforpaper... The only deadline is for the full paper: Mar 5(AOE) openreview.net/group?id=rl-... Affected folks may also contact the PCs to discuss deadline extensions before Mar 5.