Peter Vamplew

Exclusive: Web of Science company involved in dubious awards in Iraq Hayder A. Dhahad, Iraq’s deputy minister for scientific research affairs, speaks at an awards ceremony at the country’s Science Day celebration. Source: Instagram In the string of prestigious…

@clarivate.com says it takes retractions into account when calculating its highly coveted researcher designations. But Qusay Hassan, who has had 21 papers retracted, was one of several scientists winning accolades at the ministry’s Iraq Education Conference 2025 in Baghdad earlier this month.

New #J2C Certification:

Demonstration-Guided Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning

Junlin Lu, Patrick Mannion, Karl Mason

https://openreview.net/forum?id=FQAgFgkaFG

#reinforcement #demonstrations #objective

3 mana for a 6/5 flying trample with 3 damage on ETB? That's some level of power creep!

A keyboard with a row of tiny plastic ducks positioned above the function keys.

I'm feeling much more organised after tidying up my office yesterday. I finally have all my ducks in a row.

YouTube video by FNRLux FNR Awards 2025: Outstanding PhD Thesis - Florian Felten

Congratulations to @ffelten.bsky.social whose thesis on multi-objective reinforcement learning was deservedly awarded the Luxembourg National Research Fund's Outstanding PhD Thesis Award 🏆

As a side-benefit, we get this great accessible introduction to MORL video: youtu.be/VEXRuhJDkoA

It's been 8 months since I notified @springernature.com of a clear-cut case of fake references in a book chapter which they published. They have still not taken any action as they claim to still be investigating.

I will not review for Springer again until this matter is satisfactorily resolved.

Hey @springernature.com. What was the point in me setting my status to Paused on the Reviewer Dashboard yesterday if you're going to send me another review today anyway? Not to mention that paper was 99% unrelated to my area of research. Don't turn into MDPI.

The viral "Definition of AGI" paper tells you to read fake references which do not exist!

Proof: different articles present at the specified journal/volume/page number, and their titles exist nowhere on any searchable repository.

Take this as a warning to not use LMs to generate your references!

Is anyone else on Overleaf's free plan? Have you had issues with compile time-outs? I gather that the time-limit for compilation on the free plan was cut in Aug, but it's only in the last few days that I've had problems. Today I can't even compile a 2-page document with no tables or figures.

This image and caption made me laugh! Bravo!

Dear Benjamin,

Congrats on being the fastest scammy conference organiser of all time. Inviting me to a conference unrelated to the topic of my paper is highly questionable, but you did it within a day of publication so at least you’re fast.

Kindly remove me from your mailing list.

Regards,
Peter

It examines the components of effective human apologies, and analyses how and how well these have been implemented in prior apologetic AI systems. Haddie has done a fantastic job here - this is the most thorough and in-depth student publication that I've been fortunate enough to be involved in.

AI apology: a critical review of apology in AI systems - Artificial Intelligence Review Apologies are a powerful tool used in human-human interactions to provide affective support, regulate social processes, and exchange information following a trust violation. The emerging field of AI apology investigates the use of apologies by artificially intelligent systems, with recent research suggesting how this tool may provide similar value in human-machine interactions. Until recently, contributions to this area were sparse, and these works have yet to be synthesised into a cohesive body of knowledge. This article provides the first synthesis and critical analysis of the state of AI apology research, focusing on studies published between 2020 and 2023. We derive a framework of attributes to describe five core elements of apology: outcome, interaction, offence, recipient, and offender. With this framework as the basis for our critique, we show how apologies can be used to recover from misalignment in human-AI interactions, and examine trends and inconsistencies within the field. Among the observations, we outline the importance of curating a human-aligned and cross-disciplinary perspective in this research, with consideration for improved system capabilities and long-term outcomes.

Computer says sorry?

After months in copy-editing hell, Haddie Harland's review of AI apology research is now available: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

This is a must read for anyone interested in how AI systems can effectively and appropriately use apologies to facilitate human interaction 1/2

Have it also make the initial suggestion of a dish, otherwise there's a risk you might accidentally choose something which you do have the ingredients for.

Decisions, decisions. Which should I read first?

This has saved me so many hours. www.tablesgenerator.com

Dsouza, Ofosu, Amaogu, Pigeon, Boudreault, Maghoul, Moreno-Cruz, Leonenko: BoreaRL: A Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning Environment for Climate-Adaptive Boreal Forest Management https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.19846 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.19846 https://arxiv.org/html/2509.19846

Lingxiao Kong, Cong Yang, Oya Deniz Beyan, Zeyd Boukhers
Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning for Large Language Model Optimization: Visionary Perspective
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.21613

The deadline for my postdoc on scalable clinical decision support is closing in 1 week: 4 October (Australian Eastern standard Time). Please share with anyone that you think would be interested

@tresvillain.bsky.social Andrew, for consistency you need to change your name to Trendvillian :-)

Dear authors who I shall not name. Thank you for citing my work. But I'm not sure that a paper dating from 1995 should be cited in the context of a paragraph which begins "Recent trends show...."

It might be skewed by the topics I search, but I find that almost every response I get contains at least one statement which is clearly wrong. So I just skip past them these days and go to the search results. It's not just Google, I've found Copilot Pro to be just as bad.

Your student might find this paper by @lnalegre.bsky.social interesting: arxiv.org/pdf/2505.23708

Why would you love them? My experience is that they are blatantly incorrect about 90% of the time.

⚠️ The #CHI2026 paper I submitted? It almost didn't exist. That's the BTS part academics never post. So I will…to normalize what I call unglamorous persistence.

This summer was one of my hardest, mentally. 🌥️ Between ...
1/n

Hey! There's finally someone else in Australia doing research in multi-objective reinforcement learning. @marcusgal.bsky.social arxiv.org/pdf/2509.14816

Interesting. We've noticed that changes in greedy policy can cause interference in the vector values learned by a multi-objective RL agent which hurts learning, but hadn't measured how frequently that happens. This paper suggests it might be a bigger issue than we thought.

Magritte's "This is not a pipe" meme, saying: This is not the paper This is an AI-generated summary. You haven't read the paper.

[42] 42. Liu, H., et al.: Global and local structure preserving network for 3D human pose estimation. IEEE Trans. Image Process. 30, 1158–1171 (2021)