Here's another paper we'll be presenting at ICML'26 - @icmlconf.bsky.social. Laplacian Representations for Decision-Time Planning openreview.net/forum?id=6Jw... This work was led by Dikshant Shehmar, and he'll be presenting on 8th July at 2 pm, Korea time. This video summarizes the idea well ↓

I'm honoured to have been renewed as one of the Canada CIFAR AI Chairs. It continues to be an honour to be part of such an amazing group. The ecosystem created by CIFAR, @amiithinks.bsky.social, and @ualberta.bsky.social continues to be a major factor for our success. cifar.ca/cifarnews/20...

Government of Canada and CIFAR announce $24M investment in top AI Talent - CIFAR

CIFAR

cifar.ca

Our paper, “The Cell Must Go On! AgarCL as an Evaluation Platform for Continual RL“, has been accepted at @rl-conference.bsky.social'26! This work was led by Mohamed Ayman as a master's student at Univ. of Alberta and Amii. Preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2505.18347 Blog post: medium.com/@marlos.chol...

The Cell Must Go On! AgarCL as an Evaluation Platform for Continual RL

Continual learning is becoming more popular, with people from diverse research ideologies promoting it. Naturally, as with everything else…

medium.com

Wake up Samurai, RLVG IS BACK! 😎 We are happy to announce the awesome speakers of the second edition of the RLVG workshop: @alexkearney.com, @marloscmachado.bsky.social, Martin Singh-Bloom, Sam Devlin, Pete Wurman and @neuroai.bsky.social! Join us August 15th at @rl-conference.bsky.social!

A couple of months ago, we released a preprint of one of my favourite papers I’ve ever written. It lies at the intersection of representation learning and neuroscience. I have now written a blog post about it. Preprint: biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Blog post: medium.com/@marlos.chol...

From Pixels to Place Cells: Where Representation Learning Meets Neuroscience

I have been itching to talk about a paper we put out on bioRxiv last year, and I finally found the time to write about it. This is a…

medium.com

"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.

Marlos C. Machado@marloscmachado.bsky.social · last yr.

📢 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 👇

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!

Martin Klissarov@martinklissarov.bsky.social · last yr.

As AI agents face increasingly long and complex tasks, decomposing them into subtasks becomes increasingly appealing. But how do we discover such temporal structure? Hierarchical RL provides a natural formalism-yet many questions remain open. Here's our overview of the 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...

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

The RLC accepted workshops list is out rl-conference.cc/accepted_wor...! Programmatic RL Causal RL RL and videogames Inductive biases and RL and returning from last year: RL beyond rewards, finding the frame, and RL in practice!

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

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

RLC registration is up! Last year we sold out so register early. In particular, register early if you need Canadian visas. rl-conference.cc/register.html

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!

AAAI-25 New Faculty Highlights Program - AAAI

New Faculty Highlights Room 121B This year, AAAI is continuing its invited speaker program, highlighting AI researchers who have just begun careers as new faculty members or the equivalent in industry...

aaai.org

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.

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

RLC abstract submission deadline is AOE today! And remember, it's just the abstracts, not the cover pages or anything else.

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.

Martin Klissarov@martinklissarov.bsky.social · last yr.

Can AI agents adapt zero-shot, to complex multi-step language instructions in open-ended environments? We present MaestroMotif, a method for skill design that produces highly capable and steerable hierarchical agents. Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2412.08542 Code: github.com/mklissa/maestromotif

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 😅

RLC/RLJ Reviewer Role Change Request

Thank you for your interest in participating in the RLC/RLJ review process! In some cases people have been invited to more junior reviewing roles than would be appropriate. If this has happened to you...

docs.google.com

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!

Reinforcement Learning Conference@rl-conference.bsky.social · 2y ago

RLC 2025 is looking for reviewers and reviewer nominations, for folks looking to innovate on the RL reviewing process. If you know someone qualified, please nominate them (but read the docs below): forms.gle/3yCeBjn4Yhi7... And please help us spread the word!