Aditya Makkar

ep41 - A minimal history of optimal control - inControl Outline00:00 - Intro02:55 - Brachistochrone problem20:52 - Beginning of the calculus of variations32:00 - Principle of least action42:37 - Maximum principle1:02:35 - Dynamic programming1:11:12 - Linea...

Great episode: www.incontrolpodcast.com/1632769/epis...

Examples of common false beliefs in mathematics The first thing to say is that this is not the same as the question about interesting mathematical mistakes. I am interested about the type of false beliefs that many intelligent people have while ...

Examples of common false beliefs in mathematics

mathoverflow.net/questions/23...

I should read this. Looks fun.

This is what a great podcast looks like.

I miss Euclidean geometry...

Sixty years of percolation ( Hugo Duminil-Copin )

arxiv.org/pdf/1712.04651

There can’t be too many technical blogs. Is it possible to just use their URLs?

+1 Plus they are beautiful! Why would you not want to learn beautiful things?

Myself and two of the lab members @daphne-cornelisse.bsky.social and @adityamakkar.bsky.social will be at NeurIPS starting tomorrow. Come chat with us about all things RL.

Fun puzzles!

What's frustrating about LLM text is it almost short circuits your brain. It's optimized to convince a tired rater and so it is maximally convincing when scanning

Led me to a very informative wikipedia entry en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opaque_...

Also “stochastic gradient descent”.

Percepta | A General Catalyst Transformation Company Transforming critical institutions using applied AI. Let's harness the frontier.

We're finally out of stealth: percepta.ai
We're a research / engineering team working together in industries like health and logistics to ship ML tools that drastically improve productivity. If you're interested in ML and RL work that matters, come join us 😀

Or more simply, popularity is submodular.

Reinforcement Learning: An Overview This manuscript gives a big-picture, up-to-date overview of the field of (deep) reinforcement learning and sequential decision making, covering value-based methods, policy-based methods, model-based m...

Reminded again of Kevin Murphy's excellent RL overview: arxiv.org/abs/2412.05265
A lot of the stuff covered here really is at the cutting edge and not compiled so nicely anywhere else

My favorite open problem:

Conjecture (Frankl). Let X be a finite set, and let S ⊆ P(X) be a collection of subsets of X which is closed under union.

If S≠∅ and S≠{∅}, then some element x∈X appears in at least half of the elements of S, i.e.
2|{s ∈ S : x ∈ s}| ≥ |S|.

Another fun open problem:

Conjecture (Rota). Let n be a natural number. Let V be an n-dimensional vector space. Let B₁, …, Bₙ be bases of V.

Then there exist orderings of these bases
Bₖ = (bₖ₁, …, bₖₙ)
such that {b₁ₖ, …, bₙₖ} is a basis of V for all 1 ≤ k ≤ n.

Mesmerizing
Source: images.wur.nl/digital/coll...

Supertzar, or the Hand of Doom The sleep of reason produces utility monsters.

A critical look at intelligence explosion arguments, with references to I.J. Good, Jimmy Savage's small and large worlds, Kathleen Wilkes' argument against thought experiments in psychology, and Tolkien's theory of subcreation (+ some Sabbath references): realizable.substack.com/p/supertzar-...

Quanta has some coverage on her solution, including from this colourful presentation. One detail that i liked -- she had worked through advanced undergrad math curriculum by herself by 14. Hopefully she is able to handle the sudden attention well.

www.quantamagazine.org/at-17-hannah...

Great intro to Optimal Stopping on those lecture notes by Thomas S. Ferguson

www.math.ucla.edu/~tom/Stoppin...

The Power of Resets in Online Reinforcement Learning Simulators are a pervasive tool in reinforcement learning, but most existing algorithms cannot efficiently exploit simulator access -- particularly in high-dimensional domains that require general fun...

This week's #PaperILike is "The Power of Resets in Online Reinforcement Learning" (Mhammedi et al., 2024).

If you're doing RL in sim, why not use the sim to its full potential? Reset to any state! (gym.Env.reset() is not all we need.)

PDF: arxiv.org/abs/2404.15417

my p doom? sorry that's not a valid sigma algebra

Gaussian Processes and Reproducing Kernels: Connections and Equivalences This monograph studies the relations between two approaches using positive definite kernels: probabilistic methods using Gaussian processes, and non-probabilistic methods using reproducing kernel Hilb...

Looks like a great new foundations and trends monograph arxiv.org/abs/2506.17366

Born on 23 June 1912 in London, Alan Turing, a mathematician, cryptographer and a pioneer in computer science and artificial intelligence

pubs.aip.org/physicstoday...

Robust Autonomy Emerges from Self-Play Self-play has powered breakthroughs in two-player and multi-player games. Here we show that self-play is a surprisingly effective strategy in another domain. We show that robust and naturalistic drivi...

Hiring a postdoc to scale up and deploy RL-based planning onto some self-driving cars! We'll be building on arxiv.org/abs/2502.03349 and learn what the limits and challenges of RL planning are. Shoot me a message if interested and help spread the word please!

Full posting to come in a bit.

It was a dream come true to teach the course I wish existed at the start of my PhD. We built up the algorithmic foundations of modern-day RL, imitation learning, and RLHF, going deeper than the usual "grab bag of tricks". All 25 lectures + 150 pages of notes are now public!

Does everyone in your community agree on some folk knowledge that isn’t published anywhere? Put it in a paper! It’s a pretty valuable contribution

—I want a painting of a solar eclipse. Have you seen one?
—You bet!