Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Dylan Foster 🐢 @djfoster.bsky.social · 6d

MSR NYC is hiring spring and summer interns in AI/ML/RL!

Apply here: jobs.careers.microsoft.com/global/en/jo...

Microsoft Research Lab - New York City - Microsoft Research

Apply for a research position at Microsoft Research New York & collaborate with academia to advance economics research, prediction markets & ML.

www.microsoft.com

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Reposted by Dylan Foster 🐢

Miro Dudik @mdudik.bsky.social · 20d

🚨Microsoft Research NYC is hiring🚨

We're hiring postdocs and senior researchers in AI/ML broadly, and in specific areas like test-time scaling and science of DL. Postdoc applications due Oct 22, 2025. Senior researcher applications considered on a rolling basis.

Links to apply: aka.ms/msrnyc-jobs

Microsoft Research Lab - New York City - Microsoft Research

Apply for a research position at Microsoft Research New York & collaborate with academia to advance economics research, prediction markets & ML.

aka.ms

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Dylan Foster 🐢 @djfoster.bsky.social · 26d

For details, see the following links:

Empirical ML/AI: jobs.careers.microsoft.com/global/en/jo...

Theoretical ML/AI: jobs.careers.microsoft.com/global/en/jo...

Search Jobs | Microsoft Careers

jobs.careers.microsoft.com

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Dylan Foster 🐢 @djfoster.bsky.social · 26d

Microsoft Research New York City (www.microsoft.com/en-us/resear...) is seeking applicants for multiple Postdoctoral Researcher positions in ML/AI!

These are positions for up to 2 years, starting in July 2026.

Application deadline: October 22, 2025

Microsoft Research Lab - New York City - Microsoft Research

Apply for a research position at Microsoft Research New York & collaborate with academia to advance economics research, prediction markets & ML.

www.microsoft.com

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Dylan Foster 🐢 @djfoster.bsky.social · Aug 27

Quick reminder: The deadline for our workshop on Foundations of Reasoning in Language Models (FoRLM) at NeurIPS 2025 is next Wednesday, Sept 3!

Dylan Foster 🐢 @djfoster.bsky.social · Aug 11

Announcing the first workshop on Foundations of Language Model Reasoning (FoRLM) at NeurIPS 2025!

📝Soliciting abstracts that advance foundational understanding of reasoning in language models, from theoretical analyses to rigorous empirical studies.

📆 Deadline: Sept 3, 2025

Dylan Foster 🐢 @djfoster.bsky.social · Aug 11

Help us understand how reasoning emerges, where it fails, and how it can be systematically improved.

Website (& CFP/instructions): reasoning-workshop.github.io

Submission link: openreview.net/group?id=Neu...

See you in San Diego!

FoRLM @ NeurIPS'25

NeurIPS 2025 Workshop -- San Diego, California, USA

reasoning-workshop.github.io

Dylan Foster 🐢 @djfoster.bsky.social · Aug 11

Led by Audrey Huang (ahahaudrey.bsky.social), with co-organizers Adam Block, Sadhika Malladi (sadhika.bsky.social), Will Merrill (lambdaviking.bsky.social), Pavel Izmailov, Akshay Krishnamurthy (akshaykr.bsky.social), Tatsunori Hashimoto, and myself.

Bluesky

ahaaudrey.bsky.social

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Dylan Foster 🐢 @djfoster.bsky.social · Aug 11

Featuring amazing speakers Alekh Agarwal, Yejin Choi (yejinchoinka.bsky.social), Michael Hahn (m-hahn.bsky.social), and Nathan Lambert (natolambert.bsky.social).

yejinchoinka.bsky.social

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Dylan Foster 🐢 @djfoster.bsky.social · Aug 11

Announcing the first workshop on Foundations of Language Model Reasoning (FoRLM) at NeurIPS 2025!

📝Soliciting abstracts that advance foundational understanding of reasoning in language models, from theoretical analyses to rigorous empirical studies.

📆 Deadline: Sept 3, 2025

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Dylan Foster 🐢 @djfoster.bsky.social · Jul 15

For those at ICML, Audrey will be presenting this paper at the 4:30pm poster session this afternoon! West Exhibition Hall B2-B3 W-1009

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Reposted by Dylan Foster 🐢

Gautam Kamath @gautamkamath.com · Jun 30

ICML's election for their board of directors has begun. I've thrown my hat in the ring. Please consider voting for Gautam Kamath.

I have experience with the governance of TMLR, COLT, and ALT, and I think I've demonstrated myself as a consciencious and engaged community member.

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Reposted by Dylan Foster 🐢

Tom Silver @tomssilver.bsky.social · Jun 29

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

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...

arxiv.org

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Reposted by Dylan Foster 🐢

let-all.com @let-all.com · Jun 24

📣Join us at COLT 2025 in Lyon for a community event!
📅When: Mon, June 30 | 16:00 CET
What: Fireside chat w/ Peter Bartlett & Vitaly Feldman on communicating a research agenda, followed by mentorship roundtable to practice elevator pitches & mingle w/ COLT community!
let-all.com/colt25.html

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Reposted by Dylan Foster 🐢

Eugene Vinitsky 🍒 @eugenevinitsky.bsky.social · Jun 21

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.

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...

arxiv.org

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Reposted by Dylan Foster 🐢

Jason Hartline @jasonhartline.bsky.social · Jun 9

At the IDEAL annual meeting and saw this paper presented. Basically: reducing length of chain of thought LLM computations by deleting intermediate computations, more like classical functional programming where only function call and return values are important.

arxiv.org/abs/2503.14337

PENCIL: Long Thoughts with Short Memory

While recent works (e.g. o1, DeepSeek R1) have demonstrated great promise of using long Chain-of-Thought (CoT) to improve reasoning capabilities of language models, scaling it up during test-time is c...

arxiv.org

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Reposted by Dylan Foster 🐢

Clément Canonne @ccanonne.github.io · Jun 4

RADEMACHER CHAOS 🤘

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Dylan Foster 🐢 @djfoster.bsky.social · May 26

Link: sites.google.com/view/rltheor...

RL theory seminars - Next Seminar

May 27th 2025, 6 pm UTC Speaker: Dhruv Rohatgi (MIT) Title: Computational-Statistical Tradeoffs at the Next-Token Prediction Barrier: Autoregressive and Imitation Learning under Misspecification Pape...

sites.google.com

Dylan Foster 🐢 @djfoster.bsky.social · May 26

Dhruv Rohatgi will be giving a lecture on our recent work on comp-stat tradeoffs in next-token prediction at the RL Theory virtual seminar series (rl-theory.bsky.social) tomorrow at 2pm EST! Should be a fun talk---come check it out!!

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Reposted by Dylan Foster 🐢

RL Theory Virtual Seminars @rl-theory.bsky.social · May 20

Later today, Sikata and Marcel will talk about their recent work on oracle-efficient RL with ensembles. Join us!

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Dylan Foster 🐢 @djfoster.bsky.social · May 19

The abstract submission deadline for FoPt has been extended to the 21st of May (11:59pm UTC).

Submission website: openreview.net/group?id=lea...

Dylan Foster 🐢 @djfoster.bsky.social · May 9

Announcing the first workshop on Foundations of Post-Training (FoPT) at COLT 2025!

📝 Soliciting abstracts/posters exploring theoretical & practical aspects of post-training and RL with language models!

🗓️ Deadline: May 19, 2025

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Reposted by Dylan Foster 🐢

Dylan Foster 🐢 @djfoster.bsky.social · May 9

Announcing the first workshop on Foundations of Post-Training (FoPT) at COLT 2025!

📝 Soliciting abstracts/posters exploring theoretical & practical aspects of post-training and RL with language models!

🗓️ Deadline: May 19, 2025

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Dylan Foster 🐢 @djfoster.bsky.social · May 9

Website (& CFP/instructions): fopt-workshop.github.io

Submission link: openreview.net/group?id=lea...

See you in Lyon!

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Dylan Foster 🐢 @djfoster.bsky.social · May 9

Featuring amazing speakers Csaba Szepesvari (skiandsolve.bsky.social), Sadhika Malladi (sadhika.bsky.social), and Samy Jelassi.

With co-organizers Adam Block, Audrey Huang (ahahaudrey.bsky.social), Akshay Krishnamurthy (akshaykr.bsky.social), Nived Rajaraman, and Ayush Sekhari.

Csaba Szepesvari (@skiandsolve.bsky.social)

⛷️ ML Theorist carving equations and mountain trails | 🚴‍♂️ Biker, Climber, Adventurer | 🧠 Reinforcement Learning: Always seeking higher peaks, steeper walls and better policies. https://ualberta.ca/~...

skiandsolve.bsky.social

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Dylan Foster 🐢 @djfoster.bsky.social · May 9

Announcing the first workshop on Foundations of Post-Training (FoPT) at COLT 2025!

📝 Soliciting abstracts/posters exploring theoretical & practical aspects of post-training and RL with language models!

🗓️ Deadline: May 19, 2025

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Dylan Foster 🐢 @djfoster.bsky.social · May 3

Paper link: arxiv.org/abs/2503.21878

11/11

Is Best-of-N the Best of Them? Coverage, Scaling, and Optimality in Inference-Time Alignment

Inference-time computation offers a powerful axis for scaling the performance of language models. However, naively increasing computation in techniques like Best-of-N sampling can lead to performance ...

arxiv.org

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