Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Claas Voelcker

@cvoelcker.bsky.social

2.6K followers 390 following 540 posts

Thou shalt not disfigure the soul! The square root of a goat is one If I seem very angry, check if I have been watered in the last 24 hours. For professional, see https://cvoelcker.de

cvoelcker.de

Posts Media Videos Starter Packs

Pinned

Claas Voelcker @cvoelcker.bsky.social · Nov 11

And most importantly, I'm at least 200% nicer than I appear in any given moment, so let me know if you really just want to geek out about random shit!

Claas Voelcker @cvoelcker.bsky.social · Nov 11

I'm Claas, a hopefully-soon-finished-PhD researcher at @uoft.bsky.social . I work on reinforcement learning, especially on deep model-based methods, and am dabbling in diffusion policies and large-scale imitation learning.
I'm way too political and loud in general, so please be warned.

2 9

Claas Voelcker @cvoelcker.bsky.social · 3d

Since there is a decent amount of "Do we know how LLMs work?" discourse flowing around, I would be really interested to hear what people would accept as "understanding how LLMs work". What kind of knowledge are we speaking about here?

Claas Voelcker @cvoelcker.bsky.social · 3d

Sometimes D&D adventures are hilariously badly written:

Players hear a voice telling them to bring NPC X. They have to bring NPC X to open the door. If NPC X died earlier in the adventure, X will wait for them behind the door.

So if X dies it is behind the door that can ONLY be opened by X???

Reposted by Claas Voelcker

ellie lockhart (she/they) @eleanor.lockhart.contact · 4d

A lot of folks in the AI space are like people who insist it’s safe and smart to get drunk in the driver’s seat of their Tesla on a country road and a lot of their opponents are like people saying there’s no such thing as an automatic transmission

2 36 280

Claas Voelcker @cvoelcker.bsky.social · 5d

I don't understand how the Canadian AI/ML ecosystem wants to attract and retain talents when they are offering less then half the salary on representative roles...

Claas Voelcker @cvoelcker.bsky.social · 5d

Put on arxiv before acceptance, yes or no?

3 1

Claas Voelcker @cvoelcker.bsky.social · 6d

Really great rant!

David Picard @davidpicard.bsky.social · 6d

It's a great discussion because we all have different interpretation of what this means and what the consequences are.

Myself, I have absolutely no doubt that scaling works. If you have all the videos in the world and are able to train a model that can recall and merge any of them, then for sure...

Reposted by Claas Voelcker

spacecowboy @spacecowboy17.bsky.social · Jul 19

Enjoying the For You feed? Give it a like ♡ to help more people discover it: bsky.app/profile/did:...

The more people use it -> the more feedback we get -> the better we can make it for you.

27 190 1.5K

Claas Voelcker @cvoelcker.bsky.social · 6d

A totally unrelated question: does anybody know how to make long equations work on mobile with math jax and Jekyll 😅🙈

Claas Voelcker @cvoelcker.bsky.social · 6d

cvoelcker.de/blog/2025/re...

I finally gave in and made a nice blog post about my most recent paper. This was a surprising amount of work, so please be nice and go read it!

a close up of a sad cat with the words pleeeaasse written below it

ALT: a close up of a sad cat with the words pleeeaasse written below it

media.tenor.com

1 3

Claas Voelcker @cvoelcker.bsky.social · 6d

Thank you ❤️

Claas Voelcker @cvoelcker.bsky.social · 6d

cvoelcker.de/blog/2025/re...

I finally gave in and made a nice blog post about my most recent paper. This was a surprising amount of work, so please be nice and go read it!

a close up of a sad cat with the words pleeeaasse written below it

ALT: a close up of a sad cat with the words pleeeaasse written below it

media.tenor.com

7 27

Claas Voelcker @cvoelcker.bsky.social · 6d

cvoelcker.de/blog/2025/re...

Here ya go!

Relative Entropy Pathwise Policy Optimization - Technical Overview | Claas A. Voelcker

A lightweight overview of the new REPPO algorithm

cvoelcker.de

1 1 1

Claas Voelcker @cvoelcker.bsky.social · 7d

Congrats! May your GPU and space access live long and prosper!

Reposted by Claas Voelcker

Eugene Vinitsky 🍒 @eugenevinitsky.bsky.social · 7d

RL rant time after reading another LLM paper about whether "RL sharpens the distribution or discovers new knowledge.": RL is not magic. If your exploration policy takes an action with 0 probability, it can't explore that action! It trivially just affects the distribution of supported actions.

3 2 37

Claas Voelcker @cvoelcker.bsky.social · 12d

Stanford and Berkeley are functionally equivalent places and I refuse to treat them as separate entities.

Claas Voelcker @cvoelcker.bsky.social · 12d

But those are WOOOOOOORK :D

Claas Voelcker @cvoelcker.bsky.social · 12d

I have been told I need to get more modern in my paper promotion! github.com/cvoelcker/reppo / arxiv.org/abs/2507.11019 @marcelhussing.bsky.social

Happy guy sad guy meme with sad text: USE PPO AND TUNE HYPERPARAMETER FOR WEEKS and happy text: USE REPPO AND GET A POLICY

1 2 10

Claas Voelcker @cvoelcker.bsky.social · 13d

My grad school salary advise: find a loving partner before grad school, get them a work visa and a well-paid job in your school location, have them wildly out-earn you because they are brilliant and tada... sugar-partner! Tested for your convenience!

Eugene Vinitsky 🍒 @eugenevinitsky.bsky.social · 13d

My career advice? Come into a big inheritance from a long lost aunt as well as a big, possibly haunted house formerly inhabited by generations of your family

1 6

Claas Voelcker @cvoelcker.bsky.social · 14d

I pitched this ~8 years ago! It was going to provide the services "AI consultancy" and "blockchain consultancy". Our highly trained consultants would say "no" when you ask about AI or blockchain, and then just give you a normal database and some working SQL.

Mark Riedl @markriedl.bsky.social · 14d

I’m starting a new AI consulting company called It’s Not Going To Work, LLC. Here’s how it works. You give me $100,000, I tell you “It’s not going to work”(TM), you save $1M+ in wasted contracts, lots of wasted effort, and embarrassment. It’s a good deal. Try it out.

Gizmodo @gizmodo.com · 14d

Lionsgate Is Founding Out It's Really Hard to Make Movies With AI https://gizmodo.com/lionsgate-is-founding-out-its-really-hard-to-make-movies-with-ai-2000663222

Claas Voelcker @cvoelcker.bsky.social · 14d

I know I'm like... 3 years late to the party, but wow, custom preamble prompts make chatgpt so much more useful.

Claas Voelcker @cvoelcker.bsky.social · 14d

Sometimes I wonder how certain researchers get famous when _none_ of their results are replicable, even with their own published code?!

You may chose if I mean you in this rant...

Reposted by Claas Voelcker

Eugene Vinitsky 🍒 @eugenevinitsky.bsky.social · 15d

We've hired some *fantastic* researchers but our startup is still looking for 2-3 more people with skills in ML/RL/LLMs. If you'd like to work on some transformative applied problems, hit me up. We'll be launching publicly soon too...

8 37

Reposted by Claas Voelcker

Eugene Vinitsky 🍒 @eugenevinitsky.bsky.social · 16d

Happy Rosh Hashanah. May this year be better than the last one!

1 16

Claas Voelcker @cvoelcker.bsky.social · 16d

Reminds me of my favourite high-dim stat tidbit: the more dimensions you measure, the less likely it is to be close to the center (or average across all of them). High-dim Gaussian is a ball.

1 5

Claas Voelcker @cvoelcker.bsky.social · 16d

The only thing I want in life is a math textbook that tells me _why_ we need a thing and what we need it to look like, before it rigorously defines it. Why is it always the other way around???

Claas Voelcker @cvoelcker.bsky.social · 17d

@tmlrorg.bsky.social I keep getting assigned to review papers where I know close to nothing about the subject area. Is there a way to change the paper matching algorithm (e.g. exclude some of my works) or refuse review?