Lukas Schäfer @lukaschaefer.bsky.social · 01/10/2026All still work in progress, but you can definitely expect a return to RL and multi-agent learning together with continuing research on learning from data/ imitation learning ;) 110
Lukas Schäfer @lukaschaefer.bsky.social · 01/10/2026A big thank you to everyone I worked with at Microsoft, it's been a lot of fun and I learned a lot during these two years. Special thanks to Sergio Valcarcel Macua and @katjahofmann.bsky.social for their continued support and mentorship, and for helping me navigate faculty applications! 010
Lukas Schäfer @lukaschaefer.bsky.social · 01/10/2026Excited to share some news! After two wonderful years at MSR, I will be returning to academia as a tenure-track assistant professor at the University of Southern Denmark (SDU) for their new Vejle campus in January 2027. Until then, I'm taking some time to recharge to dive into it with fresh energy!static.klipy.comColville GiddyALT: Colville Giddy 241
Lukas Schäfer @lukaschaefer.bsky.social · 14/07/2026This looks awesome! We need benchmarks that consider coordination between agents. Also super cool to see cross comparison between LLM/ VLM and MARL agents! Congrats to @kale-ab.bsky.social & co. 👏 094
Lukas Schäfer @lukaschaefer.bsky.social · 09/07/2026At @icmlconf.bsky.social and still some energy left? If you’re interested in imitation learning/ world action models, checkout our poster this afternoon 2:30pm where we explain - theoretically and empirically - how future modelling introduces an explicit trade off that can improve performance! 👇 060
Lukas Schäfer @lukaschaefer.bsky.social · 02/07/2026I’ll be in Seoul till Friday so I’m sure there will be a chance to chat! 010
Lukas Schäfer @lukaschaefer.bsky.social · 01/07/2026It’s a shame but there will always be a next time — Looking forward to it! 020
Lukas Schäfer @lukaschaefer.bsky.social · 01/07/2026Thanks for the kind words @sharky6000.bsky.social! Hah! Definitely happy to chat about MARL and world models 😄 120
Lukas Schäfer @lukaschaefer.bsky.social · 01/07/2026Lastly, you can find me, Sergio Valcarcel Macua, and Pallavi Choudhury on Wed July 8, 11-11:30am at the Microsoft booth! We'll have a Q&A and we can talk world models, world action models, imitation learning, and more. Please come by and chat if this sounds interesting to you! 110
Lukas Schäfer @lukaschaefer.bsky.social · 01/07/2026On Monday evening, I'll also be at the AI for Games social where I'll give a talk about our research in games at MSR and join for the panel! First panel discussion so that should be exciting 👀 You can register via 👉 luma.com/wf7pe0eeluma.comAI for Games - ICML Social · LumaAI for Games [Notice: You must be registered for ICML Tutorials to join this event.] Games have been a proving ground for AI since the earliest game-playing… 210
Lukas Schäfer @lukaschaefer.bsky.social · 01/07/2026I will be at @icmlconf.bsky.social in Seoul over the next week - first time in South Korea and at ICML so looking forward to an exciting week! I'll be co-presenting our work on PIDMs for offline imitation learning - Poster Session 7 - Hall A #304 - Thu, Jul 9 at 2:30pm - details 👇 See you there! 281
Lukas Schäfer @lukaschaefer.bsky.social · 09/02/2026In short, our paper derives new theory that explains when and why PIDMs show promise, especially in the low-data regime where BC often fails, and validates this theory in small-scale and realistic experiments. Checkout the preprint for more details! 010
Lukas Schäfer @lukaschaefer.bsky.social · 09/02/2026Super excited to be able to share more about this project! At MSR, we have looked into PIDMs as alternative architectures for imitation learning to understand when and why they offer promise! Learn more at the blog post: msft.it/6047QMkd3 and the arXiv preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2601.21718msft.itRethinking imitation learning with Predictive Inverse Dynamics ModelsThis research looks at why Predictive Inverse Dynamics Models often outperform standard Behavior Cloning in imitation learning. By using simple predictions of what happens next, PIDMs reduce ambiguity... 2111
Lukas Schäfer @lukaschaefer.bsky.social · 19/01/2026I'll be giving a talk at Cohere Labs about my research on decision making agents and world models at Microsoft Research! 📅 January 20th (Tomorrow!) 5pm GMT/ 6pm CET/ 9am PST 📍 Online (link below) Everyone is welcome! Link via calendar invite and more details: cohere.com/events/coher...cohere.comCohere Labs - Lukas Schäfer, Postdoc Researcher, Microsoft ResearchCohere Labs - Lukas Schäfer - Decision-Making in Modern Video Games: From Human Play to World Models 192
Lukas Schäfer @lukaschaefer.bsky.social · 07/12/2025It’s a wrap for me. Thanks a lot to the organisers for putting #EurIPS together, it’s been a fantastic week and one of my favourite conference experiences. Looking forward to seeing how this experiment will continue!🤞 040
Lukas Schäfer @lukaschaefer.bsky.social · 02/12/2025📣We're hiring new research interns for 2026 at MSR Cambridge! If you're interested in ML research (esp. generative AI and/ or decision making agents), please consider applying. It's a great collaborative environment with a very kind and capable team! apply.careers.microsoft.com/careers/job/...apply.careers.microsoft.comResearch Intern - Machine Learning - People Centric AI | Microsoft CareersIn collaboration with your mentor and a diverse team, contribute to solving an ambitious research challenge and translate your results into actionable insights that are relevant to potential applicati... 041
Lukas Schäfer @lukaschaefer.bsky.social · 01/12/2025On Saturday (6th Dec), I'll be at the EurIPS workshop on Epistemic Intelligence in Machine Learning where I'll be presenting a poster on the same topic! If this sounds interesting to you, please pop by and let us know what you think! 030
Lukas Schäfer @lukaschaefer.bsky.social · 01/12/2025Tmrw (Tue 2nd Dec, 13:50-14:10), I'll be giving a talk on this topic titled "Exploiting State and Action Uncertainty for Imitation Learning using Inverse Dynamics Models" at the Interactive Learning and Interventional Representations (ILIR) workshop of the ELLIS UnConference! 110
Lukas Schäfer @lukaschaefer.bsky.social · 01/12/2025I'll also be presenting work from my postdoc at MSR Cambridge in collaboration with the Game Intelligence team and MSR NYC. In our work, we dug deeper into recent imitation learning algorithms to theoretically & empirically understand what makes them work. You can find me talking about this 👇 110
Lukas Schäfer @lukaschaefer.bsky.social · 01/12/2025I'm in Copenhagen for #EurIPS this week, please reach out if you'd like to chat about decision-making research! I'm also on the academic job market for assistant professorship positions in Europe - if you believe I could be a good fit, please reach out, I'd love to connect and chat over☕! 140
Reposted by Lukas SchäferKale-ab Tessera @kale-ab.bsky.social · 26/11/2025Thrilled to present HyperMARL at #NeurIPS2025 in San Diego next week! 🚀 (Amos will present at @euripsconf.bsky.social too.) TL;DR: Coupling obs and agent IDs can hurt performance in MARL. Agent-conditioned hypernets cleanly decouple grads and enable specialisation. 📜: arxiv.org/abs/2412.04233 3135
Lukas Schäfer @lukaschaefer.bsky.social · 20/10/2025It was great to visit @sheffielduni.bsky.social today to give an invited talk on work from my PostDoc at MSR, and have a chance to talk to students and faculty at the CS department. Thanks a lot to Robert Loftin for the kind invitation and for hosting me! 010
Lukas Schäfer @lukaschaefer.bsky.social · 26/08/2025Fingers crossed it’ll actually live up to the hype accumulated over all these years 🙏 010
Lukas Schäfer @lukaschaefer.bsky.social · 26/08/2025Thanks for sharing, hadn’t seen this before and definitely plan to catch up! 100
Reposted by Lukas SchäferKale-ab Tessera @kale-ab.bsky.social · 03/08/2025🇨🇦 Heading to @rl-conference.bsky.social next week to present HyperMARL (@cocomarl-workshop.bsky.social) and Remember Markov (Finding The Frame Workshop). If you are around, hmu, happy to chat about Multi-Agent Systems (MARL, agentic systems), open-endedness, environments, or anything related! 🎉 092
Reposted by Lukas SchäferEugene Vinitsky 🍒 @eugenevinitsky.bsky.social · 11/07/2025Will be at ICML and looking to hire a postdoc to help us scale up and deploy RL in self-driving. So, hit me up to chat. 1236
Lukas Schäfer @lukaschaefer.bsky.social · 10/07/2025The Edinburgh RL Reading group is back with a fresh new website 👏 Anyone is welcome to attend! 040
Lukas Schäfer @lukaschaefer.bsky.social · 29/06/2025Love these curated and shareable feeds on here. Such a good feature to give more control to the users and community to make the experience what they want it to be rather than leaving it in the control of the platform! 020
Lukas Schäfer @lukaschaefer.bsky.social · 23/06/2025Eugene is awesome! — if you are interested in autonomous driving and RL, and New York sounds like an exciting place for a postdoc then this is an amazing opportunity! 👇 010
Reposted by Lukas SchäferEugene Vinitsky 🍒 @eugenevinitsky.bsky.social · 21/06/2025Hiring 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.arxiv.orgRobust Autonomy Emerges from Self-PlaySelf-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... 36025
Lukas Schäfer @lukaschaefer.bsky.social · 19/06/2025We also updated and moved our code exercises which we had built for a summer school to the marl-book github page so they can be easily found at github.com/marl-book/ma... Thanks @sacha2.bsky.social for the reminder on that! They had previously been hidden inside my GitHub account 😅github.comGitHub - marl-book/marl-book-exercises: Code exercises for the MARL TextbookCode exercises for the MARL Textbook. Contribute to marl-book/marl-book-exercises development by creating an account on GitHub. 020
Lukas Schäfer @lukaschaefer.bsky.social · 19/06/2025Our textbook “Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning: Foundations and Modern Approaches” has sold out! Another print round with minor corrections is in production with @mitpress.bsky.social and coming 👏 An errata of these corrections and the updated book PDF can already be found at www.marl-book.com 2316
Lukas Schäfer @lukaschaefer.bsky.social · 04/06/2025Awesome to see the slides publicly available, wasn’t aware they are now! And yes actually, the code exercises are here: github.com/LukasSchaefe... Good point though, I wanted to migrate them to the book github project. I’ll have a stab at that later!github.comGitHub - LukasSchaefer/marl-book-exercises: Code exercises for the MARL TextbookCode exercises for the MARL Textbook. Contribute to LukasSchaefer/marl-book-exercises development by creating an account on GitHub. 030
Reposted by Lukas SchäferKale-ab Tessera @kale-ab.bsky.social · 27/05/2025📜🤖 Can a shared multi-agent RL policy support both specialised & homogeneous team behaviours -- without changing the learning objective, requiring preset diversity levels or sequential updates? Our preprint “𝘏𝘺𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘔𝘈𝘙𝘓: 𝘈𝘥𝘢𝘱𝘵𝘪𝘷𝘦 𝘏𝘺𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘯𝘦𝘵𝘸𝘰𝘳𝘬𝘴 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘔𝘶𝘭𝘵𝘪-𝘈𝘨𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘙𝘓” explores this! 1122
Lukas Schäfer @lukaschaefer.bsky.social · 23/05/2025That sounds exciting! Are there any recordings or slides available to check this out? 👀 100
Lukas Schäfer @lukaschaefer.bsky.social · 21/05/2025Today, I’ll be presenting our work on exploration in MARL using ensembles here! 👇 Multiagent Learning Session Where: Ambassador Ballroom 1 & 2 When: 14:00 - 14:13 I’ll also present the poster later at the Learn track of the poster session at 15:45 - 16:30 020
Lukas Schäfer @lukaschaefer.bsky.social · 21/05/2025Thanks! We wanted to have a game with more realistic visuals. We decided on CS:GO mainly since there already existed an open dataset to train on and compare results to prior methods that used the same dataset. Also, we finished initial experiments actually on the same day as CS2 released 😅 110
Lukas Schäfer @lukaschaefer.bsky.social · 18/05/2025Thanks for the encouragement Marc — I’ll look out for you! 010
Lukas Schäfer @lukaschaefer.bsky.social · 18/05/2025Thanks to all the co-authors and collaborators! Logan Jones, Anssi Kanervisto, Yuhan Cao, Tabish Rashid, Raluca Georgescu, David Bignell, Siddhartha Sen, Andrea Treviño Gavito, and first and foremost Sam Devlin It's been an absolute joy working with this group of kind folks 👏 020
Lukas Schäfer @lukaschaefer.bsky.social · 18/05/2025Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2312.02312 It took some time but I'm super excited that now our code is also open-source and available for everyone to use at: github.com/microsoft/im...github.comGitHub - microsoft/imitation_learning_in_modern_video_games: Accompanying code for "Visual Encoders for Data-Efficient Imitation Learning in Modern Video Games" publicationAccompanying code for "Visual Encoders for Data-Efficient Imitation Learning in Modern Video Games" publication - microsoft/imitation_learning_in_modern_video_games 140
Lukas Schäfer @lukaschaefer.bsky.social · 18/05/2025At the Adaptive and Learning Agents Workshop I'll be presenting our comprehensive study on the efficacy of different visual encoders for imitation learning in modern video games. I'll be presenting the work as a short talk and poster at the ALA workshop on Monday! 121
Lukas Schäfer @lukaschaefer.bsky.social · 18/05/2025This has been a long time coming, thanks a lot for my collaborators for all their help! Oliver Slumbers, Stephen McAleer, Yali Du, Stefano V Albrecht, and David Mguni It's actually going to be my first ever oral presentation, so excited (and nervous) about that 👀 220
Lukas Schäfer @lukaschaefer.bsky.social · 18/05/2025At the main conference, I'll be presenting our work on using ensembles of value functions for multi-agent exploration! I'll be presenting the oral at the Multi-agent Learning 1 session on Wednesday (2:00 - 3:45pm), and the poster after 3:45pm! Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2302.03439 131
Lukas Schäfer @lukaschaefer.bsky.social · 18/05/2025On my way to Detroit for @aamasconf.bsky.social! Looking forward to presenting the last work from my PhD at the main conference, and work from @msftresearch.bsky.social at the Adaptive and Learning Agents Workshop. More info 👇 If you'd like to chat, feel free to DM me! 282