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Natasha Jaques

@natashajaques.bsky.social
4.4K followers 277 following 52 posts

Assistant Professor at UW and Staff Research Scientist at Google DeepMind. Social Reinforcement Learning in multi-agent and human-AI interactions. PhD from MIT. Check out socialrl.cs.washington.edu and natashajaques.ai.

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Reposted by Natasha Jaques
Allen School @uwcse.bsky.social · 23/04/2026
#HuskyGivingDay is here! Gifts of any amount help unlock up to $10K more for #UWAllen priorities like undergraduate scholarships, which ensures that an Allen School education remains within reach of students regardless of their means. Let's go! bit.ly/hgd-allen-sc... #PoweredByYou #HuskyExperience
Portrait of Benjamin Moskalensky (B.S., ‘25) with quote: “Being able to complete this experience of going to college, getting a high-level education, providing back to the research community, getting involved in my own startup — all these things were made possible.”
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Natasha Jaques @natashajaques.bsky.social · 03/10/2025
Instead of behavior cloning, what if you asked an LLM to write code to describe how an agent was acting, and used this to predict their future behavior? Our new paper "Modeling Others' Minds as Code" shows this outperforms BC by 2x, and reaches human-level performance in predicting human behavior.
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Natasha Jaques @natashajaques.bsky.social · 01/08/2025
My husband presenting his work on caregiving 😍
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Natasha Jaques @natashajaques.bsky.social · 09/07/2025
Excited to release our latest paper on a new multi-turn RL objective for training LLMs to *learn how to learn* to adapt to the user. This enables it to adapt and personalize to novel users, whereas the multi-turn RLHF baseline fails to generalize effectively to new users.
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Natasha Jaques @natashajaques.bsky.social · 01/07/2025
In our latest paper, we discovered a surprising result: training LLMs with self-play reinforcement learning on zero-sum games (like poker) significantly improves performance on math and reasoning benchmarks, zero-shot. Whaaat? How does this work?
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Natasha Jaques @natashajaques.bsky.social · 12/06/2025
Just posted a talk I gave about this work! youtu.be/mxWJ9k2XKbk
youtu.be
Self Play for Safety - Online Multi-Agent Adversarial Training for Provably Robust LLMs
YouTube video by Natasha Jaques
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Natasha Jaques @natashajaques.bsky.social · 12/06/2025
RLHF is the main technique for ensuring LLM safety, but it provides no guarantees that they won’t say something harmful. Instead, we use online adversarial training to achieve theoretical safety guarantees and substantial empirical safety improvements over RLHF, without sacrificing capabilities.
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Natasha Jaques @natashajaques.bsky.social · 12/06/2025
RLHF is the main technique for ensuring LLM safety, but it provides no guarantees that they won’t say something harmful. Instead, we use online adversarial training to achieve theoretical safety guarantees and substantial empirical safety improvements over RLHF, without sacrificing capabilities.
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Kunal Jha @kjha02.bsky.social · 09/06/2025
Oral @icmlconf.bsky.social !!! Can't wait to share our work and hear the community's thoughts on it, should be a fun talk! Can't thank my collaborators enough: @cogscikid.bsky.social y.social @liangyanchenggg @simon-du.bsky.social @maxkw.bsky.social @natashajaques.bsky.social
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Joe Barnby @joebarnby.com · 11/06/2025
At @rldmdublin2025.bsky.social this week? Check out our social learning workshop from @amritalamba.bsky.social and I tomorrow! Inc. talks from @natashajaques.bsky.social, @nitalon.bsky.social, @carocharp.bsky.social, @kartikchandra.bsky.social & more! Full schedule: sites.google.com/view/rldm202...
sites.google.com
RLDM2025SocInfWorkshop
// RLDM 2025 Workshop \\ Reinforcement learning as a model of social behaviour and inference: progress and pitfalls 12.06.2025 // 9am-1pm
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Christian Guckelsberger @creativeendvs.bsky.social · 03/06/2025
1/4 Join us and the Autotelic Interaction Research (AIR) group @aalto.fi / Finland to work on Computational Social Intrinsic Motivation (SIM) as PhD (4y) or postdoc (2y). Job ad w project description and application instructions: bit.ly/4jyNLGv. We're looking forward to learning about you!
bit.ly
Doctoral Researcher and Postdoc positions to work on Computational Social Intrinsic Motivation (SIM) | Aalto University
The Autotelic Interaction Research (AIR) group at the Dept. of Computer Science, Aalto University, Finland is looking for 1 Doctoral Researcher (2+2 years) and 1 Postdoc (2 years)  to work on Computational Social Intrinsic Motivation (SIM)
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Natasha Jaques @natashajaques.bsky.social · 19/04/2025
Human-AI cooperation is important, but existing work trains on the same 5 Overcooked layouts, creating brittle strategies. Instead, we find that training on billions of procedurally generated tasks trains agents to learn general cooperative norms that transfer to humans... like avoiding collision
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Kunal Jha @kjha02.bsky.social · 19/04/2025
Our new paper (first one of my PhD!) on cooperative AI reveals a surprising insight: Environment Diversity > Partner Diversity. Agents trained in self-play across many environments learn cooperative norms that transfer to humans on novel tasks. shorturl.at/fqsNN%F0%9F%...
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Natasha Jaques @natashajaques.bsky.social · 12/04/2025
Got a weird combination of mail today.
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Natasha Jaques @natashajaques.bsky.social · 27/03/2025
Recorded a recent "talk" / rant about RL fine-tuning of LLMs for a guest lecture in Stanford CSE234: youtube.com/watch?v=NTSY.... Covers some of my lab's recent work on personalized RLHF, as well as some mild Schmidhubering about my own early contributions to this space
youtube.com
Reinforcement Learning (RL) for LLMs
YouTube video by Natasha Jaques
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Sharon 🪳🌹 @sharonk.bsky.social · 12/03/2025
next Canadian government should think of boosting research funding up here and trying to grab as many American postdocs and researchers as possible
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xiaoxuanh.bsky.social @xiaoxuanh.bsky.social · 13/02/2025
AI has shown great potential in boosting efficiency. But can it help human society make better decisions as a whole? 🤔 In this project, using MARL, we explore this by studying the impact of an ESG disclosure mandate—a highly controversial policy. (1/6)
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Natasha Jaques @natashajaques.bsky.social · 13/02/2025
Our latest work uses multi-agent reinforcement learning to model corporate investment in climate change mitigation as a social dilemma. We create a new benchmark, and show that corporations are greedily motivated to pollute without mitigating their emissions, but if all companies defect...
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Natasha Jaques @natashajaques.bsky.social · 02/01/2025
The paper I spoke about at the #NeurIPS2024 ML for Systems workshop is now on arxiv arxiv.org/abs/2412.15573! We use multi-agent RL to solve a classic combinatorial optimization problem (the Sequential Assignment Problem), by combining MARL with a classical polynomial time assignment algorithm. 1/3
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Natasha Jaques @natashajaques.bsky.social · 21/12/2024
Repost for updating my favourite deep learning meme of all time
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Eugene Vinitsky 🍒 @eugenevinitsky.bsky.social · 21/12/2024
Astonishing how many RL bottlenecks are resolved simply by “make simulator go fast”. What if we had prioritized engineering over algorithms years ago?
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allcell9.bsky.social @allcell9.bsky.social · 19/12/2024
University of Washington researchers craft method of fine-tuning AI chatbots for individual taste www.geekwire.com/2024/univers...
geekwire.com
University of Washington researchers craft method of fine-tuning AI chatbots for individual taste
Natasha Jaques, an assistant professor at the University of Washington's Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. (UW Photo) As
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Natasha Jaques @natashajaques.bsky.social · 18/12/2024
UW News put out a Q&A about our recent work on Variational Preference Learning, a technique for personalizing Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) washington.edu/news/2024/12...
washington.edu
Q&A: New AI training method lets systems better adjust to users’ values
University of Washington researchers created a method for training AI systems — both for large language models like ChatGPT and for robots — that can better reflect users’ diverse values. It...
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Kunal Jha @kjha02.bsky.social · 12/12/2024
Really excited to present my work this Sunday @NeurIPS on how we might approach training a generalist agent capable of cooperation at scale: coordinating with many novel partners on many novel tasks has never been easier! Come by the IMOL workshop to check it out and chat more!
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Natasha Jaques @natashajaques.bsky.social · 11/12/2024
Even though the Social RL lab only got started ~1 year ago, I’m super excited to announce that we have 10 people from the lab presenting their work at #NeurIPS2024. Delighted to officially introduce our lab: socialrl.cs.washington.edu! Thread with all our NeurIPS work below 👇
socialrl.cs.washington.edu
SocialRL Lab
We are the Social Reinforcement Learning Lab at the University of Washington.
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Marc Lanctot @sharky6000.bsky.social · 02/12/2024
Let's cycle through the memes for this one until it stops... 😇😅🙏
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M.J. Crockett @mjcrockett.bsky.social · 01/12/2024
Is it Bad to leave Twitter? No. Here are 7+ years of insights from my lab’s research that explain why. Featuring work w/ @williambrady.bsky.social @killianmcloughlin.bsky.social 🧵
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Sander Dieleman @sedielem.bsky.social · 02/12/2024
Better VQ-VAEs with this one weird rotation trick! I missed this when it came out, but I love papers like this: a simple change to an already powerful technique, that significantly improves results without introducing complexity or hyperparameters.
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Peyman Milanfar @docmilanfar.bsky.social · 01/12/2024
Bayesian Fashion
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hardmaru @hardmaru.bsky.social · 01/12/2024
The Reality for AI Startups
“My AI startups is just a GPT Wrapper”
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Natasha Jaques @natashajaques.bsky.social · 30/11/2024
New relationship sin just dropped: weaponized nonchalance. When someone insists they just don't care about something, forcing you to handle it. "I guess the mess just doesn't bother me!"
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Daniel Bergstresser @dbergstresser.bsky.social · 29/11/2024
Poem by Joseph Fasano
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Eugene Vinitsky 🍒 @eugenevinitsky.bsky.social · 30/11/2024
Before the election, twitter turned into a non-stop propaganda machine. Now that the election is over, it has reverted back to recommending ML to me mostly. I hated that experience and never want to be at the whims of someone like that again
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Dan Roy @roydanroy.bsky.social · 27/11/2024
NeurIPS Test of Time Awards: Generative Adversarial Nets Ian Goodfellow, Jean Pouget-Abadie, Mehdi Mirza, Bing Xu, David Warde-Farley, Sherjil Ozair, Aaron Courville, Yoshua Bengio Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks Ilya Sutskever, Oriol Vinyals, Quoc V. Le
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Sander Dieleman @sedielem.bsky.social · 27/11/2024
Amazing blog post on flow matching, stunning visuals! It also makes the connection with normalising flows crystal clear. Incredible effort!
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Mark Riedl @markriedl.bsky.social · 22/11/2024
Alibaba has their own version on GPT-o1. This might be the best description of “o1-type”systems so far arxiv.org/abs/2411.14405
arxiv.org
Marco-o1: Towards Open Reasoning Models for Open-Ended Solutions
Currently OpenAI o1 has sparked a surge of interest in the study of large reasoning models (LRM). Building on this momentum, Marco-o1 not only focuses on disciplines with standard answers, such as mat...
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grumpybavarian.bsky.social @grumpybavarian.bsky.social · 20/11/2024
Beyond excited to introduce AlphaQubit, now published in Nature! AlphaQubit is a neural network for quantum error correction and achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on simulated and real-world data.
nature.com
Learning high-accuracy error decoding for quantum processors - Nature
A recurrent, transformer-based neural network, called AlphaQubit, learns high-accuracy error decoding to suppress the errors that occur in quantum systems, opening the prospect of using neural-network...
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Natasha Jaques @natashajaques.bsky.social · 21/11/2024
So I tried to post on X about how I'm moving to BlueSky and why. The tweet got less than 10% of the views of my 5 most recent tweets. Think the algorithm is suppressing this information? Once again, so much for a "free and open town square".
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Tim Rocktäschel @handle.invalid · 20/11/2024
Now that @jeffclune.bsky.social and @joelbot3000.bsky.social are here, time for an Open-Endedness starter pack. go.bsky.app/MdVxrtD
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joao @joao.omg.lol · 20/11/2024
Very expensive and mostly confirms established theories? /jk jk
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Natasha Jaques @natashajaques.bsky.social · 20/11/2024
Re: the scale is dead debate. Isn't it pretty obvious that just scaling is never going to work if your method breaks down on OOD inputs? The world is non-stationary, so it's constantly presenting new OOD inputs.
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Natasha Jaques @natashajaques.bsky.social · 19/11/2024
One of my first posts on twitter was "fuck twitter". I'd just like to reiterate that sentiment today, as I join bluesky
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Natasha Jaques @natashajaques.bsky.social · 19/11/2024
Thanks for the invite to get on here @eugenevinitsky.bsky.social and @sharky6000.bsky.social. Excited to not see a post from Elon as every other item in my feed. Maybe I'll actually get bold and start posting more of my real thoughts, since only the cool people seem to be on here so far :)
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Eugene Vinitsky 🍒 @eugenevinitsky.bsky.social · 13/11/2024
Lets get the multi-agent learning community started up here: go.bsky.app/9gsefkW
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