RL Reading Group

I am co-organizing an RL reading group at the Vector Institute, which is conducted fully online. All participants meet at this Zoom link: https://carleton-ca.zoom.us/j/94458342852?pwd=BALQfADPJGSfdMSNA32wp5cNnN8YBs.1 (passcode: 552958) and take turns in presenting a recent RL research paper or a recent RL library/environment that is of interest to others. The schedule is maintained here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1SX-l9vGe9jy35ibGnAohQgvIsg_nmvGjx9LfqrMzSek/edit?gid=0#gid=0. Anyone interested in RL is welcome to join future meetings or sign up to present on that Google Sheet. The meetings take place on Mondays from 3 pm – 4 pm Eastern Time.

Here is the presentation schedule for Winter 2026.

Date	Presenter	Paper Topic	Link	Email
Jan 19 2026	Sriram Ganapathi Subramanian	The Big World Hypothesis and its Ramifications for Artificial Intelligence	https://openreview.net/pdf?id=Sv7DazuCn8	[email protected]
Jan 26 2026	No Meeting (for ICML deadline)
Feb 2 2026	Michal Lisicki	KL-Regularized Reinforcement Learning is Designed to Mode Collapse	https://openreview.net/forum?id=flBRtdIihA	[email protected]
Feb 9 2026	Wenhao Li	A Comedy of Estimators: On KL Regularization in RL Training of LLMs	https://openreview.net/forum?id=MkLHbwSMP3	[email protected]
Feb 16 2026	No Meeting (Family Day)
Feb 23 2026	Fae Moradi	Understanding R1-Zero-Like Training: A Critical Perspective	https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.20783	[email protected]
Mar 2 2026	Emiliano Penaloza	Privileged Information Distillation for Language Models	https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.04942	[email protected]