Antonin Raffin
@araffin.bsky.social
3.3K followers 240 following 92 posts
Researcher in robotics and machine learning (Reinforcement Learning). Maintainer of Stable-Baselines (SB3). https://araffin.github.io/
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araffin.bsky.social
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Types of Reinforcement Learning Paper
Original image: @xkcd.com
Types of reinforcement learning papers, using xkcd original artwork
Reposted by Antonin Raffin
prefix.dev
In our little deep dive series we're now exploring how cross-compilation in the Conda ecosystem works: prefix.dev/blog/cross-c.... Back in the days, @conda-forge.org rolled this out widely to support osx-arm64 early on, and now for linux-aarch64/ppc64le.
Cross compiling in the Conda ecosystem
Cross compiling is a fundamental capability in modern software development, allowing developers to build packages for different architectures without needing access to the target hardware.
prefix.dev
Reposted by Antonin Raffin
daphne-cornelisse.bsky.social
Rapid RL experimentation is great. But how do you catch silent errors before they slip by?

In this post, I share tools and habits that help me move quickly from idea to result without sacrificing reliability.
How to catch subtle RL bugs before they catch you
Tools and habits for reliable, fast RL experimentation and development
open.substack.com
Reposted by Antonin Raffin
3blue1brown.com
Ever since I made a video about Fourier Transforms, one of the most requested topics on the channel has been its close cousin, the Laplace Transform.

I've been having a lot of fun animating a mini-series about this topic, and the main part is now out.

youtu.be/j0wJBEZdwLs
But what is a Laplace Transform?
YouTube video by 3Blue1Brown
youtu.be
Reposted by Antonin Raffin
sebastianraschka.com
Updated & turned my Big LLM Architecture Comparison article into a video lecture.

The 11 LLM archs covered in this video:
1. DeepSeek V3/R1
2. OLMo 2
3. Gemma 3
4. Mistral Small 3.1
5. Llama 4
6. Qwen3
7. SmolLM3
8. Kimi 2
9. GPT-OSS
10. Grok 2.5
11. GLM-4.5/4.6

www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNlU...
The Big LLM Architecture Comparison
YouTube video by Sebastian Raschka
www.youtube.com
araffin.bsky.social
SBX (SB3 Jax) v0.23.0 is out =)!

I added CNN support for PPO.
It turns out that using a shared features extractor (CNN in this case) is important for achieving good performance on Atari games.

Perf report: wandb.ai/openrlbenchm...

github.com/araffin/sbx
GitHub - araffin/sbx: SBX: Stable Baselines Jax (SB3 + Jax) RL algorithms
SBX: Stable Baselines Jax (SB3 + Jax) RL algorithms - araffin/sbx
github.com
araffin.bsky.social
Training a small humanoid robot with reinforcement learning using another robot for reset.

by Kaizhe Hu et al. (ToddlerBot Stanford)

Project page: robot-trains-robot.github.io
a robot arm support a robot humanoid on a treadmill
araffin.bsky.social
Open-Source Hardware in the Era of Robot Learning Workshop @ CoRL 2025

Website: open-hardware-robots.github.io/CoRL2025/
Reposted by Antonin Raffin
locoscaron.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy
The CoRL 2025 workshop on Open-Source Hardware in the Era of Robot Learning is starting now! You can join the conversation online via live streaming: https://www.youtube.com/live/ZVPIJzF1df4
Reposted by Antonin Raffin
sophie-xhonneux.bsky.social
📣 Call for Blog Posts at #ICLR2026 @iclr_conf

Following the success of the past iterations, we are opening the Call for Blog Posts 2026!

iclr-blogposts.github.io/2026/about/#...

Please retweet!
abs-0.twimg.com
araffin.bsky.social
A practical introduction to (deep) RL, providing intuitions to understand the more recent algorithms.

The plan is to start from tabular Q-learning and work our way up to Deep Q-learning (DQN). In a following post, I will continue on to Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) and its extensions.
Reposted by Antonin Raffin
locoscaron.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy
Next Saturday, 𝗔𝗻𝘁𝗼𝗶𝗻𝗲 𝗣𝗶𝗿𝗿𝗼𝗻𝗲 will present Pollen Robotics & Hugging Face's open-source robots, including Reachy Mini, the SO-100 arm, the Amazing Hand and the Open Duck Mini. He will discuss the sim2real challenges of making the Open Duck Mini walk, and how […]

[Original post on fosstodon.org]
The Open Duck Mini open-source and open-hardware robot.
Reposted by Antonin Raffin
prefix.dev
Package building with Pixi is being rolled out! Dive into our latest blog post on crafting C++ packages.

And guess what? It’s not just for C++; Pixi plays nice with Python, Rust, ROS, Mojo, and beyond!

prefix.dev/blog/pixi-b...
Build C++ projects with Pixi
Painless dependency management (including shared libraries), monorepos and CI/CD is here for C++/CMake projects with Pixi.
prefix.dev
Reposted by Antonin Raffin
Reposted by Antonin Raffin
mvandepanne.bsky.social
This is absolutely true -- this is a superb and much-needed consolidation of so much of modern RL. Kevin, inquiring minds want to understand the process you use to put this artwork together! @sirbayes.bsky.social Perhaps this is also the ultimate benchmark for Gemini Deep Research reports. ;-p
Reposted by Antonin Raffin
Reposted by Antonin Raffin
zeynepakata.bsky.social
NeurIPS has decided to do what ICLR did: As a SAC I received the message 👇 This is wrong! If the review process cannot handle so many papers, the conference needs yo split instead of arbitrarily rejecting 400 papers.
Reposted by Antonin Raffin
schaul.bsky.social
Where do some of Reinforcement Learning's great thinkers stand today?

Find out! Keynotes of the RL Conference are online:
www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...

Wanting vs liking, Agent factories, Theoretical limit of LLMs, Pluralist value, RL teachers, Knowledge flywheels
(guess who talked about which!)
Reposted by Antonin Raffin
jmac-ai.bsky.social
This one's been a long time coming.

In this post on Decisions & Dragons I answer "Should we abandon RL?"

The answer is obviously no, but people ask because they have a fundamental misunderstanding of what RL is.

RL is a problem, not an approach.

www.decisionsanddragons.com/posts/should...
Reposted by Antonin Raffin
ewrl18.bsky.social
📣Registration for EWRL is now open📣
Register now 👇 and join us in Tübingen for 3 days (17th-19th September) full of inspiring talks, posters and many social activities to push the boundaries of the RL community!
PheedLoop
PheedLoop: Hybrid, In-Person & Virtual Event Software
site.pheedloop.com
Reposted by Antonin Raffin
beenwrekt.bsky.social
If machine learning is a game, it’s Calvinball. Bitter lessons from chess don’t apply.
All our games turn into Calvinball
Why lessons from chess don't apply to machine learning
www.argmin.net
Reposted by Antonin Raffin
locoscaron.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy
Join us for the 𝗖𝗼𝗥𝗟 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟱 𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸𝘀𝗵𝗼𝗽 𝗼𝗻 𝗢𝗽𝗲𝗻-𝗦𝗼𝘂𝗿𝗰𝗲 𝗛𝗮𝗿𝗱𝘄𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗘𝗿𝗮 𝗼𝗳 𝗥𝗼𝗯𝗼𝘁 𝗟𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴! The day will bring together researchers and makers from both academia and the industry to discuss open-source robot design, integration with reinforcement learning […]

[Original post on fosstodon.org]
Flyer for the workshop on Open-Source Hardware in the Era of Robot Learning taking place at CoRL 2025