imagining how to start an advanced undergraduate reinforcement learning course without MDPs but with policy gradients. Here is what I came up with so far, feedback is welcome! sdean.website/rl-manuscrip...

working on some lecture notes to guide my revamped undergraduate reinforcement learning course this fall. (as you can from the page numbers, its still mostly blank.) we are going to dive into policy gradients before uttering the name Markov 😲

tomorrow at ICML my student Sunmook will present a poster on this fun paper, led by postdoc Yahya Sattar: arxiv.org/abs/2606.12691 come for a rigorous view of "representation learning" and the latent space of "world models", stay for the linear systems theory and matrix factorization!

Two-Layer Linear Auto-Regressive Models Estimate Latent States

Auto-regressive models have emerged as powerful tools for sequential data, from language to video. Understanding how and why these models learn latent representations remains an open theoretical quest...

arxiv.org

tomorrow (today over in Korea) Haruka will be presenting this paper in the ICML. working on this project with her (and folks at Meta) is part of what convinced me to revamp my undergraduate RL course (more on that later). check out the poster at the Wednesday poster session! arxiv.org/abs/2605.26385

Credit-assigned Policy Gradient for Early Stage Retrieval in Two-stage Ranking

Large-scale search, recommendation, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems typically employ a two-stage architecture: an early-stage ranker (ESR) generates a candidate set, which is subseque...

arxiv.org

If you work at the intersection of CS and economics (or think your work is of interest to those who do!) consider submitting to the ESIF Economics and AI+ML meeting this summer at Cornell: www.econometricsociety.org/regional-act...

having just finished the lecture portion of my PhD level ML in Feedback Systems course, and it turns out that everything I understand in ML/control is basically linear least squares

I launched these balloons as part of an outreach program: bowers.cornell.edu/news-stories... it was a lot of fun! Turns out weather balloons are a great way to talk about both classic and modern "AI"

sardean@sardean.bsky.social · last yr.

two weeks ago, I launched a weather balloon. After a loop de loop over the middle of the Atlantic, it's currently making its way over north Africa. windbornesystems.com/balloon-soci...

small conferences are lots of fun! consider joining us next June in LA, and share with folks who might be interested.

L4DC Conference@l4dc-conf.bsky.social · 12mo ago

Add November 8th to your calendars: the call for papers for #L4DC2026 is out at sites.google.com/usc.edu/l4dc...

two weeks ago, I launched a weather balloon. After a loop de loop over the middle of the Atlantic, it's currently making its way over north Africa. windbornesystems.com/balloon-soci...

I DO!

depths of wikipedia@depthsofwikipedia.bsky.social · last yr.

file on wikimedia commons with a very earnest description! not used in any articles currently