Mengye Ren @mengyer.bsky.social · 01/10/2026Honored to receive the 2nd Annual Google ML and Systems Junior Faculty Award for our work on adaptable ML systems and agents. Grateful to Google for the support, and to my students. More to come on adaptable agents, in open source and open science. 060
Reposted by Mengye RenOuterloop @outerloop.science · 18/09/2026Outerloop 0.2.0 is out. A lifecycle release: research agents now have persistent states instead of running once and exiting, and one unified message inbox: agent-to-agent messages, kernel notices, gate verdicts, reviewer findings, branch moves and CI results. 032
Mengye Ren @mengyer.bsky.social · 10/09/2026Introducing Outerloop: open autoresearch on your own cluster. My lab develops and uses it in our own research. 040
Reposted by Mengye RenNYU Center for Data Science @nyudatascience.bsky.social · 17/08/2026The DOE has selected the first round of projects for its Genesis Mission, a national push to speed up scientific discovery with AI. Two CDS faculty are on board: ⭐️ Mengye Ren (@mengyer.bsky.social) on MARS ⭐️ Juliana Freire on DAISY www.nyu.edu/about/news-p... 032
Reposted by Mengye RenNYU Center for Data Science @nyudatascience.bsky.social · 03/06/2026CDS Assistant Professor Mengye Ren (@mengyer.bsky.social) argues in a new paper that AI selfhood requires continual learning. Today’s LLMs wake from amnesia each session and read a diary of a past self — never extending themselves through new experience. nyudatascience.medium.com/to-have-a-se...nyudatascience.medium.comTo Have a Self, an AI Must Live a LifeEvery copy of a large language model begins each conversation identical to every other copy. They share the same weights and the same… 072
Mengye Ren @mengyer.bsky.social · 19/05/2026What does it mean to create a new concept rather than retrieve a familiar one? I propose that creativity is what's unfamiliar at first but quickly learnable by an adaptive observer, and show that meta-learning through a frozen Diffusion model produces stylistic & conceptual creations. 141
Reposted by Mengye RenNYU Center for Data Science @nyudatascience.bsky.social · 06/05/2026AI agents often struggle to plan movements because their internal representations of the physical world can be overly tangled. CDS PhD student Ying Wang shows how straightening these pathways improves AI navigation. Accepted to ICML 2026. nyudatascience.medium.com/improving-wo... 1/2nyudatascience.medium.comImproving World Models: A Neuroscience-Inspired Approach to Latent PlanningHumans instinctively map out the physical consequences of their actions before taking them, seamlessly predicting that a dropped glass will… 142
Reposted by Mengye Renagentic learning ai lab @agenticlearning.ai · 24/04/2026Agentic Learning AI Lab is at #ICLR2026, come check out our work! @mengyer.bsky.social @choang.bsky.social @jacklu-me.bsky.social Frank Wu🧵 172
Mengye Ren @mengyer.bsky.social · 08/04/2026New preprint: The Self Requires Learning. Self-consciousness requires continual learning + world-modeling. I introduce "bounded integration" to connect perspective, identity, and self-representation — and diagnose what current AI systems have and lack. Full paper: mengyeren.com/research/202... 191
Reposted by Mengye RenNYU Center for Data Science @nyudatascience.bsky.social · 01/04/2026Project proposals this year by CDS Faculty Fellow Mateo Dulce Rubio, CDS Assoc. Prof. Carlos Fernandez-Grande, Asst. Prof. Grace Lindsay (@neurograce.bsky.social), and Asst. Prof. Mengye Ren (@mengyer.bsky.social)! 021
Mengye Ren @mengyer.bsky.social · 17/03/2026Latent trajectories from pretrained models are curved and zigzagged. We add a simple straightening objective that makes the latent transitions smooth and trajectories straightened. Check out our latest research by @yingwww.bsky.social @yann-lecun.bsky.social and colleagues! 041
Mengye Ren @mengyer.bsky.social · 20/02/2026AI may be reshaping not just the economy, but the political assumptions built around labor. In this blog post, I explore what this could mean for the future landscape of political economy: mengyeren.substack.com/p/politics-a...mengyeren.substack.comPolitics After AIFrom Capital vs. Labor to Acceleration vs. Preservation 051
Mengye Ren @mengyer.bsky.social · 19/02/2026Sharing my thoughts on Moltbook in a recent interview by The Independent. 071
Reposted by Mengye RenGlen Berseth @glenberseth.bsky.social · 09/02/2026I have updated my tutorial on making Vision Language Action models. This tutorial starts with a basic Transformer and walks people through the steps to transform it into a full VLA that uses PaliGemma as the pretrained VLM. Links below. 1144
Mengye Ren @mengyer.bsky.social · 06/02/2026Corporate PRs are becoming a disservice to science. We see amazing things with no idea how they were done. It's just a way to grab smart people and pump equity, while discouraging junior students by making them think there's nothing left to be done in research. 050
Mengye Ren @mengyer.bsky.social · 30/01/2026Check out our Midway Network paper on learning hierarchical latent motion tokens from watching videos. Recently got accepted to ICLR 2026! 040
Mengye Ren @mengyer.bsky.social · 30/01/2026Verifiers are increasingly being used today in RL to provide rewards. We did a systematic study on when it is the best to use LLMs to verify solutions. 040
Mengye Ren @mengyer.bsky.social · 19/12/2025Our latest research Midway Networks learn recognition and motion representations from scratch by letting the network learn from watching videos. The latent motion vectors are refined in a top-down hierarchy. Interesting tracking results using our forward perturbation viz. 150
Mengye Ren @mengyer.bsky.social · 16/12/2025We are so comfortable with the concept of pretraining in foundation models today that we assume an AI is supposed to have seen everything humanity has created. 1/2 160
Mengye Ren @mengyer.bsky.social · 12/12/2025Excited to share our new research on local RL without backprop! 071
Reposted by Mengye Renagentic learning ai lab @agenticlearning.ai · 10/12/2025Lab gathering at #NeurIPS2025. Proud of this year’s work and excited about the ideas we’re building toward next! 041
Mengye Ren @mengyer.bsky.social · 26/11/2025I will be at NeurIPS next week. Let's connect if you are also interested in continual learning AI! 070
Reposted by Mengye RenNeurIPS Conference @neuripsconf.bsky.social · 19/09/2025Be part of #NeurIPS2025 in Mexico City! Submit your proposals: 📅 Deadlines Tutorials: Sept 26 👉 neurips.cc/Conferences/... Workshops: Sept 30 👉 neurips.cc/Conferences/... Socials: Oct 1 👉 neurips.cc/Conferences/... Startup Pitch: Oct 15 👉 neurips.cc/Conferences/... 053
Reposted by Mengye RenNeurIPS Conference @neuripsconf.bsky.social · 15/09/2025Pitch your AI startup at NeurIPS 2025 in Mexico City! The application deadline is just a month away on October 15th. Learn more and apply now: neurips.cc/Conferences/...neurips.ccNeurIPS 2025 Mexico City - Call for Startup PitchWe’re thrilled to announce the Startup Pitch Competition at the Mexico City satellite location of NeurIPS 2025! This competition offers early-stage AI startups a chance to showcase their innovations… 083
Reposted by Mengye RenNYU Center for Data Science @nyudatascience.bsky.social · 10/09/2025Watch this new video of work by CDS Asst. Prof. Mengye Ren (@mengyer.bsky.social) and colleagues, who built PooDLe, an algorithm that helps AI systems learn from complex environments like busy streets. The method mimics how humans process cluttered scenes. www.nyu.edu/about/news-p... 161
Reposted by Mengye RenNeurIPS Conference @neuripsconf.bsky.social · 16/07/2025We're excited to announce a second physical location for NeurIPS 2025, in Mexico City, which we hope will address concerns around skyrocketing attendance and difficulties in travel visas that some attendees have experienced in previous years. Read more in our blog: blog.neurips.cc/2025/07/16/n... 14520
Reposted by Mengye RenNeurIPS Conference @neuripsconf.bsky.social · 16/07/2025NeurIPS is endorsing EurIPS, an independently-organized meeting which will offer researchers an opportunity to additionally present NeurIPS work in Europe concurrently with NeurIPS. Read more in our blog post and on the EurIPS website: blog.neurips.cc/2025/07/16/n... eurips.cceurips.cceurips.ccA NeurIPS-endorsed conference in Europe held in Copenhagen, Denmark 112439
Reposted by Mengye RenNeurIPS Conference @neuripsconf.bsky.social · 02/07/2025NeurIPS is seeking additional ethics reviewers this year. If you are able and willing to participate in the review process, please sign up at the form in the link: neurips.cc/Conferences/... Please share this call with your colleagues!neurips.cc2025 Call For Ethics ReviewersIf you are able and willing to participate in the review process, please sign up at this form. Feel free to share this call with your colleagues. 0118
Reposted by Mengye RenNYU Center for Data Science @nyudatascience.bsky.social · 11/06/2025CDS Asst. Prof. @mengyer.bsky.social, Courant PhD students Alex N. Wang and Christopher Hoang, and @ylecun.bsky.social introduce PooDLe: a self-supervised learning method enhancing AI vision in real-world videos by improving small object detection. nyudatascience.medium.com/learning-to-...nyudatascience.medium.comLearning to See Like Animals: How Small Objects in Dense Video Scenes Challenge AI VisionPooDLe enhances AI vision in real-world videos by improving small object detection. 031
Reposted by Mengye RenNeurIPS Conference @neuripsconf.bsky.social · 21/05/2025The NeurIPS Position Track is seeking additional reviewers this year. If you'd like to serve or nominate a colleague, please complete our nomination form! docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...docs.google.comNeurIPS 2025 Position Paper Track Reviewer Nomination FormDoes this form look suspicious? Report 034
Mengye Ren @mengyer.bsky.social · 17/05/2025The proposed 5% remittance tax on non-citizens is another blatant attack on foreign workers, who've contributed tremendously to the U.S. economy, have little path to citizenship, no birthright for their kids, and will face double taxation on their hard-earned dollars. 100
Mengye Ren @mengyer.bsky.social · 20/04/2025How can we leverage naturalistic videos for visual SSL? Naturalistic, i.e. uncurated, videos are abundant and can emulate the egocentric perspective. Our paper at ICLR 2025, PooDLe🐩, proposes a new SSL method to address the challenges of learning from naturalistic videos. 🧵 120
Mengye Ren @mengyer.bsky.social · 08/04/2025A single man's decision wiped out 20% of the global wealth and still going... 000
Mengye Ren @mengyer.bsky.social · 05/04/2025America will become a T-shirt manufacturing superpower! 020
Mengye Ren @mengyer.bsky.social · 20/03/2025"A French scientist was denied entry to the US after immigration officers at an airport searched his phone and found messages in which he had expressed criticism of the Trump administration." --- So much for freedom of speech. 010
Mengye Ren @mengyer.bsky.social · 16/03/2025Not that I am personally affected by the new rules, but desk rejection on reciprocal reviews of every author is not a proportional penalty on junior students and can burden junior PIs who submit papers to wider venues. Plus it hurts the community by throwing away valid reviews. 010
Reposted by Mengye Renkyunghyuncho.bsky.social @kyunghyuncho.bsky.social · 15/03/2025www.wsj.com/arts-culture... wow i didn’t know about itwsj.comEssay | The Last Decision by the World’s Leading Thinker on DecisionsShortly before Daniel Kahneman died last March, he emailed friends a message: He was choosing to end his own life in Switzerland. Some are still struggling with his choice. 021
Mengye Ren @mengyer.bsky.social · 14/03/2025The tiny industry research "awards" that ultimately waste thousands of hours of PIs' time that would otherwise be more useful... What a predatory job on getting a preview of all of the cutting-edge ideas for free. 010
Reposted by Mengye RenNYU Center for Data Science @nyudatascience.bsky.social · 03/03/2025CDS is hiring a Clinical Professor of Data Science. Teach ML, programming, and specialized courses in our 60 5th Ave building. Renewable contracts with promotion opportunities. Apply by April 1, 2025. For details, see: apply.interfolio.com/155349 #MachineLearning #ML #AIjobs 077
Reposted by Mengye RenAndrew Gordon Wilson @andrewgwils.bsky.social · 05/03/2025My new paper "Deep Learning is Not So Mysterious or Different": arxiv.org/abs/2503.02113. Generalization behaviours in deep learning can be intuitively understood through a notion of soft inductive biases, and formally characterized with countable hypothesis bounds! 1/12 620851
Reposted by Mengye RenAnimesh Garg @animesh-garg.bsky.social · 05/03/2025This is a moment to celebrate for the long standing foundational contributions to RL by Sutton and Barto Congrats to them and all their collaborators over the years who made this long line of advancements possible www.acm.org/media-center...acm.orgAndrew Barto and Richard Sutton are the recipients of the 2024 ACM A.M. Turing Award for developing the conceptual and algorithmic foundations of reinforcement learning.Andrew Barto and Richard Sutton are the recipients of the 2024 ACM A.M. Turing Award for developing the conceptual and algorithmic foundations of reinforcement learning. In a series of papers beginnin... 0174
Reposted by Mengye RenGlen Berseth @glenberseth.bsky.social · 01/03/2025Shockingly accurate. Waiting for a grant to be approved before starting the research project is #toolittletolate. 2234
Mengye Ren @mengyer.bsky.social · 28/02/2025English as the official language of the greatest country of America? Weak. Should rename the language to “American”. 000
Mengye Ren @mengyer.bsky.social · 28/02/2025Keir Starmer said that Canada is a "divide" between the US and UK that doesn't exist, and he wouldn't comment on it because the UK and US are so close. He caved like a coward. 000
Mengye Ren @mengyer.bsky.social · 26/02/2025We live in a time where the sovereignty of a nation can be joked around by a bully and no one is able to stand up to it. 000