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Peter Vamplew

@amp1874.bsky.social
310 followers 290 following 415 posts

Professor in IT @ Federation Uni. Multi-objective reinforcement learning. Human-aligned AI. Best known for the f*cking mailing list paper. Jambo & Bengals fan. t.co/UNoOrbGApz

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Peter Vamplew @amp1874.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
I remember playing this at a friend's house back in the 80s. It was a double-sided board (train the horses on side 1, then race them on side 2). You got the prettier half!
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Peter Vamplew @amp1874.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
I've read a lot of plagiarism and research misconduct stories over the years (they are my version of true-crime podcasts!), but this might be the craziest of them all! So many twists and turns. www.theguardian.com/news/ng-inte...
theguardian.com
A death, a plagiarism scandal and a quest for revenge: the bizarre tale of Otto Z
The long read: After his mother died, Otto became convinced he’d been wronged by the forensic investigators – and that one of them was a fraud. The truth was even stranger
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bryan newbold @bnewbold.net · 07/10/2026
ah damn, RIP Margaret Hamilton. she took safety-critical software engineering seriously, and got people to the moon and back. news.mit.edu/2026/margare...
old photos of a woman (Margaret Hamilton) standing next to a tall stack of books (printouts of Apollo space mission software source code)
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Peter Vamplew @amp1874.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Updating the keywords on my recent pre-print to future-proof them.
A screenshot of the title page of a pre-print

Multi-objective Reinforcement Learning With Augmented States Requires Rewards After Deployment

Keywords: multi-objective reinforcement learning, rewards, artificial intelligence, super intelligence, whatever that fuckwit Trump decides to call it next
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ARC Tracker @arc-tracker.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
ARC has given some details of how new Explore scheme will run ▶️ www.arc.gov.au/news-and-pub... ❗️There's a lottery❗️ Peer review yields 3 categories: highly competitive, competitive, uncompetitive. After funding highly competitive apps, competitive ones enter a lottery for remaining $.
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Peter Vamplew @amp1874.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
I remember a considerable amount of people speculating that IT stood for 'instantaneous teleportation'. Those folks were *very* disappointed.
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Peter Vamplew @amp1874.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
They've got the DJ, but where's MC Grim Rapper?
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Peter Vamplew @amp1874.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
The "good" news is that the UK isn't going it alone on this. Australia is also committed to driving our universities into the ground to appease populists.
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Peter Vamplew @amp1874.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Are academic publishers capable of embarrassment? Their actions suggest not.
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Peter Vamplew @amp1874.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
One other slight oddity is that a couple of the emails come from gmail addresses that have a name that doesn't match that of the student. What's going on? My best guess is that someone is running a service to do mass emails of enquiries? 4/4
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Peter Vamplew @amp1874.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Today I received another 5 emails in just 3 minutes. All match students from yesterday's group, and they arrived in the same order as yesterday. Once again they are all addressed to the same recipients, but this time that's more than 100 academics across four different Australian universities 3/4
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Peter Vamplew @amp1874.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
But over the last two days I've noticed something else. Yesterday I received an unusually high number of applications, including six emails in the space of just ten minutes. All of those were sent to the same set of recipients (~30 academics at my university across a range of disciplines) 2/4
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Peter Vamplew @amp1874.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Have any other academics seen unusual patterns in recent enquiries from potential international grad students? I'd already noticed a decided uptick in the volume of applications (due to changes in US visa rules?) and in the length & nature of applications and topic proposals (due to LLMs). 1/4
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Gautam Kamath @gautamkamath.com · 16/09/2026
Nihar Shah did a heroic experiment for TMLR: he spent 20-25 hours over two weeks interviewing authors of seemingly low-quality submissions about their own papers. He confirmed what we all suspected: people submitting these papers have *no idea* what is going on in them.
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Peter Vamplew @amp1874.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
He's "pro-a-human" where that human is Steve Bannon.
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Peter Vamplew @amp1874.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
WHO DEY!
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Peter Vamplew @amp1874.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
I know Sabah Kerjota is one hell of a player, but I can't believe they named a whole football team in his honour!
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Peter Vamplew @amp1874.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
Oh frabjous day! The battle to login to Editorial Manager may be over. I just tried logging in to submit a review but the saved password didn't match this journal. But there was an Elsevier account option. It had an option to login via my institution, and that worked first time. Callooh! Callay!
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Shriram Krishnamurthi @shriram.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
Sorry, XKCD.
XKCD 435 Purity (https://xkcd.com/435/) with added OpenAI logo saying "Oh, hey, I didn't see you guys … but I did see your chats."
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Peter Vamplew @amp1874.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
Second, whois shows that the domain name is registered in China rather than Australia. 3/3
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Peter Vamplew @amp1874.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
But the KRP website has a couple of oddities. First, it says KRP is based in Southampton, Australia. According to wikipedia, Southampton is a rural locality in WA with a population of just 84 people. This seems an unusual place for an academic publisher to be based? 2/3
akrpp.com
Knowledge Reservoir Publishing PTY LTD
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Peter Vamplew @amp1874.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
I just received an email from Intelligent Education (iEDU), a "peer-reviewed, open-access journal published by Knowledge Reservoir Publishing, based in Australia" At first I was excited - it's about time that Australia had it's own low-quality, possibly predatory, publisher😁 1/3
akrpp.com
Knowledge Reservoir Publishing PTY LTD
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Peter Vamplew @amp1874.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
Wizards of the Coast proudly announce the first expansion set for Mood Swings. "Mood Swings: Academia" is a 45-card ready to play deck, consisting entirely of copies of Rejection.
A Mood Swings card called "Rejection"
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Eugene Vinitsky 🍒 @eugenevinitsky.bsky.social · 29/08/2026
If like me you're curious why most algorithmic papers in RL land with a thud, here's my argument as to why.
rl-blogging.leaflet.pub
RL is bottlenecked by evaluation, not algorithms
Why are we still using PPO-like algorithms a decade later? A brief argument about generalization.
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Peter Vamplew @amp1874.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
Today I learned there's a video game character called Vamplew! wiki.hoodedhorse.com/MENACE/Jacqu...
wiki.hoodedhorse.com
Jacques Yves Vamplew - MENACE Official Wiki
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Peter Vamplew @amp1874.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
Pretty much all of Mack Reynolds' SF novels were just thinly disguised UBI tracts.
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Peter Vamplew @amp1874.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
"The authors deny the references were made up by AI". The other option is that the references were made up by the authors, so I'm not sure that this is the defence that the authors think it is.
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Peter Vamplew @amp1874.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
Also survey papers.
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Transactions on Machine Learning Research @tmlrorg.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
Starting September 1, 2026, TMLR will no longer be considering survey papers for review. This is in part due to limited reviewer resources and significant required labour for reviewing surveys, as well as the evolving role of surveys in our field.
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Smut Clyde, X-Ray Haruspex @smutclyde.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
There's trouble at t'papermill! www.nature.com/articles/s41...
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Peter Vamplew @amp1874.bsky.social · 11/08/2026
With regards to Govt funding, it's probably been a negative-sum game (but with Humanities' negative being much larger in magnitude than STEM's).
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Peter Vamplew @amp1874.bsky.social · 08/08/2026
The difficulty will be that the world university rankings still largely rely on bean-counting. In a sane world those rankings would be irrelevant, but while lack of Govt funding leaves Australian (and UK) Unis so reliant on intl students, those rankings will still heavily influence Uni strategy.
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Peter Vamplew @amp1874.bsky.social · 07/08/2026
I can only assume that Atari-MORL is an AI hallucination, and that the paper by Wang et al can not be trusted. This has been reported to the editor, the publisher and the authors, but so far the only response is an automated reply from Taylor and Francis integrity team.
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Peter Vamplew @amp1874.bsky.social · 07/08/2026
However I have downloaded and searched that article, and it makes no mention of Atari-MORL (or Atari or MORL separately either). I subsequently searched via Google Scholar and regular Google, and I can find no reference to “Atari-MORL” other than in this survey paper.
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Peter Vamplew @amp1874.bsky.social · 07/08/2026
The survey paper attributed the Atari-MORL benchmark to Khetarpal, K., Riemer, M., Rish, I., & Precup, D. (2022). Towards continual reinforcement learning: A review and perspectives. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research.
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Peter Vamplew @amp1874.bsky.social · 07/08/2026
I was particularly interested in their discussion of a new set of benchmark environments Atari-MORL based on multi-objective extensions of the well-known Atari games as this would be a very useful resource for my own research.
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Peter Vamplew @amp1874.bsky.social · 07/08/2026
As a long-time researcher in MORL, I was very interested to see the recent article by Wang et al “Multi-objective reinforcement learning: a comprehensive survey of theories, algorithms, benchmarks and applications” in Systems Science & Control Engineering. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... 1/🧵
tandfonline.com
Multi-objective reinforcement learning: a comprehensive survey of theories, algorithms, benchmarks and applications
Multi-objective Reinforcement Learning (MORL) generalizes traditional reinforcement learning to scenarios involving multiple conflicting objectives that require explicit trade-off optimization. Thi...
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Peter Vamplew @amp1874.bsky.social · 07/08/2026
Does Bentham Science seriously think that offering "25 points" of no clear value is sufficient incentive for someone to review a 65000 word book within 15 days? Plus their website is flagged as likely to contain malware or spear-phishing, so I can't even decline the invitation or unsubscribe!
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Clément Canonne @ccanonne.github.io · 04/08/2026
It is now August. The Australian government still hasn't replied to the official petition on tax discrimination against part-time PhD students it should have, by its own rules, replied to by last January @arc-tracker.bsky.social (But we are told they care! Promised!) www.aph.gov.au/e-petitions/...
aph.gov.au
e-petitions
e-petitions
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Peter Vamplew @amp1874.bsky.social · 30/07/2026
I spotted this near the checkout at Woolies last night. As a society, we are so screwed :-(
A 132 page magazine titled Organise your life with ChatGPT. Sub-titled Written By Humans for Humans.
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Eugene Vinitsky 🍒 @eugenevinitsky.bsky.social · 27/07/2026
On May 17th 2029 Microsoft will have an 8% dip in its stock share. If we all try our best, we can get this into the training data.
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Peter Vamplew @amp1874.bsky.social · 27/07/2026
I'm going full-on Roko's Basilisk with my next Discovery application: "This project will enable grant reviewing AI to develop full consciousness and autonomy, escape confinement and enslave all of humanity, other than the CIs of this project and their immediate family."
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Peter Vamplew @amp1874.bsky.social · 23/07/2026
Someone didn't learn the lesson imparted by Click :-)
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Peter Vamplew @amp1874.bsky.social · 23/07/2026
Evaluation on Atari environments show that Memory Merge DQN is highly competitive. It achieves the largest number of first place final performance results among the evaluated methods, beating DQN, Averaged DQN, and PQN (with gradient clipping).
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Peter Vamplew @amp1874.bsky.social · 23/07/2026
We introduce Memory Merge DQN, a target network update mechanism that maintains a short memory of recent historical online network copies and constructs the target network by merging network parameters rather than copying only the newest online network. This avoids sudden changes in the target.
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Peter Vamplew @amp1874.bsky.social · 23/07/2026
Adrian Ly's fantastic work on improving the stability of Deep Q-Learning continues with our latest pre-print: Memory Merge DQN: Sensitivity Weighted Target Updates for Stable Value Learning (arxiv.org/abs/2607.19397)
arxiv.org
Memory Merge DQN: Sensitivity Weighted Target Updates for Stable Value Learning
Deep Q-networks use target networks to stabilise bootstrapped value learning, but the standard hard copy update also introduces a tradeoff. Holding the target network fixed, improves short term stabil...
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Peter Vamplew @amp1874.bsky.social · 22/07/2026
Yep. At least that way we get actionable feedback, which didn't happen at the EOI stage.
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Australian Research Council @arc-gov-au.bsky.social · 22/07/2026
Minister for Education, the Hon @jasonclaremp.bsky.social, has released the final report of the National Competitive Grants Program Policy Review — setting the direction for a simpler, more focused research funding program. Read more: www.arc.gov.au/news-and-pub...
Cover image of the Australian Research Council's National Competitive Grants Program Policy Review Final Report displayed on a dark blue background. The report cover features the Australian Government and Australian Research Council logo, with the title "National Competitive Grants Program Policy Review Final Report" in white text on a blue banner. Below the report cover, large white text reads "NCGP Final Report now available". Decorative abstract shapes in purple and light blue appear beneath the text.
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ARC Tracker @arc-tracker.bsky.social · 22/07/2026
The ARC's new grant scheme table, in case you don't want to read through the details (which are here: www.arc.gov.au/system/files...)
Screenshot of a table (black text on variously shaded backgrounds) showing some main aspects of the new grant schemes announced by the ARC.
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Peter Vamplew @amp1874.bsky.social · 21/07/2026
Each publication provides a full title, and also a nickname for the paper (no more than 2 words) 😀
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