Ahana D. (she/her)
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ahana.bsky.social
Ahana D. (she/her)
@ahana.bsky.social
Reinforcement Learning PhD student, UPF Barcelona.
Uncertain in the face of optimism.
ahanadeb.github.io
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Found the coolest note while cleaning out the office, clearly it belongs on the wall :) author unknown
Reposted by Ahana D. (she/her)
✨ The last day kicked off with an amazing talk by @katjahofmann.bsky.social
"World and Human Action Models for Gameplay Ideation" 🎮🤖

Exciting vision from the Game Intelligence team @msftresearch.bsky.social
September 19, 2025 at 11:31 AM
Reposted by Ahana D. (she/her)
I am in Vancouver at ICML, and tomorrow I will present our newest paper "Partially Observable Reinforcement Learning with Memory Traces". We argue that eligibility traces are more effective than sliding windows as a memory mechanism for RL in POMDPs. 🧵
July 16, 2025 at 1:35 AM
Reposted by Ahana D. (she/her)
After all these reports of authors adding language instructions for LLM reviews in their papers I wanted to check this myself and I downloaded the .tex source from one of these papers.

Here is an example.
(I will not share the identity of the paper)
July 5, 2025 at 5:12 PM
Reposted by Ahana D. (she/her)
WHAT ELSE DID THEY LIE ABOUT - dashare.zone ADMIN
June 15, 2025 at 6:07 PM
Reposted by Ahana D. (she/her)
Join us for Nneka's presentation tomorrow! Last talk before the summer break.
June 9, 2025 at 5:43 PM
Reposted by Ahana D. (she/her)
new preprint with the amazing @lviano.bsky.social and @neu-rips.bsky.social on offline imitation learning! learned a lot :)

when the expert is hard to represent but the environment is simple, estimating a Q-value rather than the expert directly may be beneficial. lots of open questions left though!
May 27, 2025 at 7:13 AM
Reposted by Ahana D. (she/her)
new work on computing distances between stochastic processes ***based on sample paths only***! we can now:
- learn distances between Markov chains
- extract "encoder-decoder" pairs for representation learning
- with sample- and computational-complexity guarantees
read on for some quick details..
1/n
May 26, 2025 at 1:27 PM
Reposted by Ahana D. (she/her)
"The chatbot responded that it was perfectly okay for landlords to discriminate based on whether those potential tenants need rental assistance"

From "Government officials are letting AI do their jobs. Badly," by @emilymbender.bsky.social & @alexhanna.bsky.social

thebulletin.org/2025/05/gove...
Government officials are letting AI do their jobs. Badly
Offloading government responsibilities to AI can encourage discrimination, give wrong advice, and limit access to valid claims of asylum.
thebulletin.org
May 31, 2025 at 5:05 PM
Reposted by Ahana D. (she/her)
Disabled people have been pleading with folks to show solidarity for years.

We saw the rising tide of eugenics the moment everyone declared Covid over & decided to leave us by the wayside.

Pandemics give rise to fascism. What we’re seeing is the result of allowing disabled folks to be left behind
May 21, 2025 at 5:01 AM
Reposted by Ahana D. (she/her)
found a cool game theory book
arxiv.org/abs/1512.06808
May 21, 2025 at 10:18 AM
Reposted by Ahana D. (she/her)
Trying to get my head round how this could make it to print. Many warning signs for all of us
This was just posted by @tbretc.bsky.social on another platform. The Chicago Sun-Times obviously gets ChatGPT to write a ‘summer reads’ feature almost entirely made up of real authors but completely fake books. What are we coming to?
May 20, 2025 at 11:26 AM
Reposted by Ahana D. (she/her)
In the year of our Lord 2025... we are still putting on makeup on women without their consent.
It's truly like feminism never happened 🙅‍♀️
(I have been ranting about this ever since people started using it to demonstrate GANs back in the 2010s, I can't believe it's still an "acceptable" task in AI!)
May 8, 2025 at 3:24 PM
I have started a substack lately on my random thoughts, if anyone's interested <3
Why I don't write in my mother tongue
an attempt to untangle my feelings about my mother tongue Bangla
open.substack.com
May 2, 2025 at 10:45 AM
Singapore book haul! (+ St Jordi)
April 28, 2025 at 1:44 PM
Had a lot of fun presenting our work at "Offline RL in Regular Decision Processes: Sample Efficiency via Language Metrics" at #ICLR2025, with my co-authors Alessandro Ronca and Sadegh Talebi!

check out our paper here: openreview.net/forum?id=EW6...
April 27, 2025 at 6:32 PM
Reposted by Ahana D. (she/her)
"It's wonderful watching the well of knowledge being poisoned in real time".
📷 Emily Gorcenski
April 18, 2025 at 9:02 AM
Reposted by Ahana D. (she/her)
First draft online version of The RLHF Book is DONE. Recently I've been creating the advanced discussion chapters on everything from Constitutional AI to evaluation and character training, but I also sneak in consistent improvements to the RL specific chapter.

rlhfbook.com
April 16, 2025 at 7:01 PM
A mid-week self reminder
April 16, 2025 at 10:25 AM
Reposted by Ahana D. (she/her)
A relatedly bad idea is working on research you don't deeply believe in for pragmatic reasons. You start with "oh, it'll be a quick low-hanging fruit project" and 9 months later you're still working on it and in despair
There's barely anything more soul-crushing than being bored. Structuring your entire life to avoid it? Great call.
April 16, 2025 at 3:22 AM
Took a weekend off to travel to Bruges. It was beautiful :O
April 14, 2025 at 8:57 AM
Reposted by Ahana D. (she/her)
Mark your calendars, EWRL is coming to Tübingen! 📅
When? September 17-19, 2025.
More news to come soon, stay tuned!
April 8, 2025 at 8:33 AM
Reposted by Ahana D. (she/her)
Thought-canceling headphones
March 11, 2025 at 6:25 PM
Reposted by Ahana D. (she/her)
Beautiful.
March 11, 2025 at 12:49 AM
Reposted by Ahana D. (she/her)
Congrats to this year's Turing award winners! www.nytimes.com/2025/03/05/t...

Incidentally, if you'd like to hear from them, we know a place they've given / are giving keynotes
Turing Award Goes to A.I. Pioneers Andrew Barto and Richard Sutton
Andrew Barto and Richard Sutton developed reinforcement learning, a technique vital to chatbots like ChatGPT.
www.nytimes.com
March 7, 2025 at 2:38 AM
Made a small drawing in memory of my partner’s cat :’)
March 3, 2025 at 11:27 AM