Reflections on Running and Research

UCSC-UCI Social at NeurIPS 2025 The first week of December was a whirlwind. I kicked it off by attending NeurIPS. As someone doing reinforcement learning (RL) research, I was blown away by the amount of attention the field garnered. From applications in autonomous driving to continual learning, RL has re-emerged as the critical tool to navigate complex tasks where supervised learning falls short.…