What a person can accomplish with LLMs and other recent tools is amazing. I am looking for new project ideas for a data science course to help people understand where LLMs can be used instead of traditional methods and how to use them for real industry projects. Any ideas?

The reason to learn this skill is so that people can then uses their well tuned Baloney detector for themselves on their own work to make sure they produce the highest quality they can.

Eugene Vinitsky 🍒@eugenevinitsky.bsky.social · last wk.

A significant goal of conference review is to train students to critically analyze papers. This feels totally forgotten about and it's almost never used for this.

Made a short (not really short) reading list of #ICML papers to keep up on robotics and RL. Check out the list here www.fracturedplane.com/blog/2026/07...

In Seoul for #ICML2026. Message me to catch up or talk about why #Reinforcementlearning will always improve model performance. We just need to make it even better.

This year, RLC includes a show at Cirque du Soleil! However, there aren't unlimited tickets; the venue is only so big. So register soon to guarantee your spot!

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

Do we remember this? All RLC 2026 attendees receive a complimentary banquet dinner and a pass to Cirque du Soleil! And you can bring a guest too! Details @rl-conference.cc/register.html Don't miss spending a few eventful days with our wonderful RL community Aug 15-18. We hope to see you there!

Paid LLMs were down this morning. Again. So I did what any prof does — I open-sourced my whole local LLM setup. Remote GPU via SSH, Ollama, OpenCode, benchmarking scripts. For private docs, planning, learning, and when the cloud flakes out. It's like a spare tire for AI.

This has been a wild week! I have been planning to take my lecture recordings from 3 years + my slides and turn them into a book on #RobotLearning! It seemed like the perfect 12 days to push! I got about halfway through before Fable was disrupted. Stay tuned for updates.

Compositional generalization is hard enough without being restricted to the limited availability of robotics data. In our new paper we use VLMs to autonomously decompose long-horizon demonstrations into diverse, language-labeled sub-tasks boosting VLA robustness!

Exciting news! I am delighted to share the wonderful news that I have been granted tenure! This milestone marks the completion of my time as an Assistant Professor, and I am profoundly grateful for the support, collaboration, and inspiration I have received from this incredible community.

Now accepting submissions for journal papers to appear in RLC! Want more face time for your work and to attend an awesome party with a great community? Submit here.

Reinforcement Learning Conference@rl-conference.bsky.social · 3mo 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...

Still true. There is a lot more knowledge left to be learned.

Sung Kim@sungkim.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Bitter Lesson

Now that #NeurIPS is a few hours past, back to robotics. Where are people getting their bi manual arm mounts?

Still no cache size management in Python UV? Pretty easy to reach 50g in a week of coding. Bump: github.com/astral-sh/uv...

uv cache size limit · Issue #5731 · astral-sh/uv

Unless I missed it, I think currently there is no way to limit the cache size. I think this would be valuable in ci self-hosted runners where the cache can grow pretty big due to the need to suppor...

github.com

To learn about our #iclr2026 paper on learning representations to improve combinatorial generalization go find @danielblawson9 and Adriana at our poster on Sat: 9:30 AM – 12:00 PM EDT Pavilion 4 P4-#4512. self-pred-bc.github.io

After a busy start to the year, I have a new lecture to share. Generalist models have been making good progress, but #sim2real just works. In this lecture, I explain domain randomization, simulation limitations, and connections to generalization.

The sub-agent teams are getting very good. So good, I may have to start providing my students with management textbooks soon.

@obsidian.md + Claude = : 🔥 Having your AI agent help organize and process your thoughts and ideas all on your computer is amazing.

Just a few days left to submit your work to @rl-conference.bsky.social ! All attendees will get an awesome show from Cirque du Soleil.

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

RLC attendees will also enjoy the banquet featuring a theatrical dinner show by Cirque du Soleil (LUDŌ): www.cirquedusoleil.com/ludo All the more reason not to miss the chance to be part of RLC 2026!

🚀 Montreal #Robotics Summer School 2026 — Applications Now Open! 📅 Dates: August 2–7, 2026 📍 Location: @mila-quebec.bsky.social a (in person) 🤖 Program: 1 day of activities + 5 days of intensive Robotics & AI training (theory and hands-on)

I am rerunning my class on robot learning this year, and I plan to push many code examples to help others get to the ugly details fast. One of these details is how BC gets off track as network sizes change. Blog and notebook below.

I have updated my tutorial on making Vision Language Action models. This tutorial starts with a basic Transformer and walks people through the steps to transform it into a full VLA that uses PaliGemma as the pretrained VLM. Links below.

I am looking forward to our first round of speakers tomorrow at @Mila_Quebec #worldmodels workshop. world-model-mila.github.io

How, after billions of dollars spent on code generation tool development they still can't reliably generate a working Dockerfile...

I am finally fully benefiting from making my lecture content in LaTeX. Creating new content powered by LLMs to make examples and translate my content to a webpage and a book is a breeze. Just need to figure out how to add references faster.

Reinforcement Learning Conference (RLC) was added to the AI conference DL countdown. rl-conference.cc March 1: Abstract DL (AoE) March 5: Submission DL (AoE) Conference: Montreal, Quebec, Canada, August 16th -19th, 2026.

AI Conference DL Countdown@dlcountdown.bsky.social · 7mo ago

ICML'26 (abs): 17 days. ICML'26 (paper): 22 days. RLC'26 (abs): 54 days. RLC'26 (paper): 58 days. ECCV'26: 58 days.

Another exciting year for more RL! Submit your work to the RL conference and join us to talk a out how to make RL even better.

I'll be giving a talk tomorrow in the Embodied World Models for Decision Making workshop at #NeurIPS. I will present a number of recent works from my lab on combining foundational models with planning and RL. When: 11:30-noon Where: Level Room 30A-E

#VisionLanguage models are increasingly used for a wide range of problems, but seem complex to build. I wrote some code and recorded a tutorial in my lab yesterday to help others demystify how to create these models. #keepbuilding

My lab is looking for new students who are very passionate about foundational models and planning/RL/robotics. Apply via Mila. I will also be at #NeurIPS to discuss research ideas and opportunities. See notes below for application advice.

This not only seems illegal but is a breach of the social contract and trust in this research system. I can't see any good reason for breaking the confidentially of research grants and reference letters.

Michael Hendricks 🇨🇦@michaelhendricks.bsky.social · 9mo ago

Canadian researchers should be aware the there is a motion before the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Science and Research to force Tricouncils to hand over disaggregated peer review data on all applications: Applicant names, profiles, demographics Reviewers names, profiles, comments, and scores