1/ Two papers from our lab were accepted to COLM this year: LakeQuest, led by Michael Solodko, and AgentIR, led by Zijian Chen. A bit about each below.

📣 I am hiring postdoctoral fellows in agentic AI at the R2L Lab @uwcheritoncs.bsky.social Lead your own agenda - systems that read, reason & act. Top-venue publishing, substantial compute, weekly PI 1:1s, and a real path to faculty/industry. Apply 👉 academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/32140

I helping recalibrate Waterloo’s software engineering program (and to some degree CS) for the age of AI. I wrote an essay on the challenges I’m seeing. www.victorzhong.com/writing/the-...

R2L Lab will be at #ICLR2026! Check out Arthur Chen's grounded adaptation of agents post deployment, and Sitao Cheng's study of compositional generalization through RL! I'll also be there, please email to meet. arxiv.org/abs/2511.04847 arxiv.org/abs/2512.01970

Test-Time Adaptation for LLM Agents via Environment Interaction

Large language model (LLM)-based agents struggle to generalize to novel and complex environments, such as unseen websites or new sets of functions, due to a fundamental mismatch between their pre-trai...

arxiv.org

I spent the last week going ham on coding agents. I feel like they are much more powerful than using web apps because CLI agents are much more customizable and can spawn subprocesses.

I will be at the IVADO agents workshop followed by COLM in Montreal. Please email me if you would like to meet. R2L Lab will be looking for 1-2 graduate students in 2026!

Now that school is starting for lots of folks, it's time for a new release of Speech and Language Processing! Jim and I added all sorts of material for the August 2025 release! With slides to match! Check it out here: web.stanford.edu/~jurafsky/sl...

I finally finished it! www.victorzhong.com/writing/refl...

We would like to extend our warmest thanks to the organizing committee @sivareddyg.bsky.social, Dawn Song, @yoshuabengio.bsky.social, Alane Suhr, @chrisjpal.bsky.social, @yusu-agent.bsky.social and @vzhong.bsky.social.

Do you have a PhD (or equivalent) or will have one in the coming months (i.e. 2-3 months away from graduating)? Do you want to help build open-ended agents that help humans do humans things better, rather than replace them? We're hiring 1-2 Research Scientists! Check the 🧵👇

I think in retrospect ARR might have been a bad idea. Am I hallucinating or is there an exodus of junior NLP researchers from *ACL into ML conferences and COLM?

Are you an established professor in AI open to moving to the University of Waterloo? Please DM me directly!

Flying out of DCA for the first time and I gotta say - this has ought to be one of the worst airports in North America… so cramped people are literally sitting on the ground or standing shoulder to shoulder

This is how digital feudalism works. It offers the illusion of empowerment. Likes become validation. Followers feel like influence. Monetisation looks like success. But the rules are hidden. The platform decides what rises and what vanishes.

Is Best-of-N really the best we can do for language model inference? New paper (appearing at ICML) led by the amazing Audrey Huang (ahahaudrey.bsky.social) with Adam Block, Qinghua Liu, Nan Jiang, and Akshay Krishnamurthy (akshaykr.bsky.social). 1/11

Incredible lineup of speakers at #CUA #WORKSHOP @ #ICML2025! Speakers part 3/3: Qingyun Wu (Penn State University) @qingyunwu.bsky.social Zhiyong Wu (Shanghai AI Lab) Victor Zhong (University of Waterloo, Vector Institute) @vzhong.bsky.social

Teaching for the first time: I finished the last official lecture of the class and got a surprise round of applause! Feels so great!

A bit of a mess around the conflict of COLM with the ARR (and to lesser degree ICML) reviews release. We feel this is creating a lot of pressure and uncertainty. So, we are pushing our deadlines: Abstracts due March 22 AoE (+48hr) Full papers due March 28 AoE (+24hr) Plz RT 🙏

We've kept pushing our Open-R1 project, an open initiative to replicate and extend the techniques behind DeepSeek-R1 And even we were mind-blown by the results we got with this latest model we're releasing: ⚡️OlympicCoder [1/3]

#InternationalWomensDay is a time to promote women’s equity by celebrating women’s achievements, raising awareness about discrimination and taking action to forge gender parity. Meet some of the exceptional women in Science who are helping to #AccelerateAction: bit.ly/3XCAft9 @uwaterloo.ca

Report: CANADA! CANADA! CANADA! CANADA! CANADA! CANADA!

The democratization and commoditization of foundation models is happening and will continue to happen - regulation will not slow nor stop it. Secrecy, propriety moats, and trade embargoes may succeed briefly in AI, but they will fail. And when they do, they will likely fail hard.

📣 Big news for sustainability in tech! 🔋 CS Professor Martin Karsten and his collaborators Peter Cai and Joe Damato have developed a small modification to the Linux kernel — now part of Linux 6.13 — that could cut energy use in data centres by up to 30%. cs.uwaterloo.ca/news/cherito...

#AI hallucinations are a problem; #UWAllen Ph.D. student @akariasai.bsky.social may have the answer. She was named a @techreviewjp.bsky.social Innovator Under 35 for her work to make #LLMs more transparent and useful—without making stuff up. #IU35 #AIforGood news.cs.washington.edu/2025/01/07/w...

‘Working to solve global problems’: Allen School Ph.D. student Akari Asai named one of MIT Technology Review’s Innovators Under 35 Japan - Allen School News

Despite their growing potential and increasing popularity, large language models (LLMs) often produce responses that are factually inaccurate or nonsensical, also known as hallucinations. Allen School...

news.cs.washington.edu

Sadly, we have lost a brilliant researcher and colleague, Felix Hill. Please see this note, where I have tried to compile some of his writings: docs.google.com/document/d/1...

For Felix

Devastatingly, we have lost a bright light in our field. Felix Hill was not only a deeply insightful thinker -- he was also a generous, thoughtful mentor to many researchers. He majorly changed my lif...

docs.google.com

Shoutout to the Pearson Air Canada lost+found folks.. Got in exhausted after a ~24 hour journey and realized at 11pm that I forgot my laptop in seat stowage. Filed a claim 11pm and received found notice 5am. Bussed to airport and recovered at 8am. Would have lost my lecture notes and talk slides!

bye, felix kyunghyuncho.me/bye-felix/

Terrible tragedy. Douwe posted this on X: x.com/douwekiela/s... With a link and details about the service London: > his family have asked to share this webpage for the celebration of his life: pp.events/felix

Andrew Lampinen@lampinen.bsky.social · 2y ago

Felix Hill was such an incredible mentor — and occasional cold water swimming partner — to me. He's a huge part of why I joined DeepMind and how I've come to approach research. Even a month later, it's still hard to believe he's gone.

Faculty position doing AI for materials discovery! Come join us at the @uoftmse @uoft.bsky.social jobs.utoronto.ca/job/Toronto-... Plenty of exciting opportunities in the GTA and with @acceleration_c and @vectorinst.bsky.social in particular! Please share and retweet!