Jenny Zhang
@jennyzhangzt
RS Intern @AIatMeta • PhDing @UBC • Grad Student @VectorInst • Undergrad @imperialcollege • Reinforcement Learning, Self-Improving AI, Open-endedness
**When AIs Start Rewriting Themselves** Darwin Gödel Machine: Open-Ended Evolution of Self-Improving Agents The Darwin Gödel Machine can: 1. Read and modify its own code 2. Evaluate if the change improves performance 3. Open-endedly explore the solution space 🧵👇
All the reviews of all my NeurIPS submissions are of high quality. They're not all positive, but they're all courteous and constructive, and nothing looks LLM-generated.
My reviews have been constructive across the board; meaningful feedback from all 4. It's my first major conference submission too, so I was mentally prepared to have everything either torn to shreds or to be fed AI slop but I've been pleasantly surprised😃
1/ 🕵️ Algorithm discovery could lead to huge AI breakthroughs! But what is the best way to learn or discover new algorithms? I'm so excited to share our brand new @rl_conference paper which takes a step towards answering this! 🧵
I’m building a new team at @GoogleDeepMind to work on Open-Ended Discovery! We’re looking for strong Research Scientists and Research Engineers to help us push the frontier of autonomously discovering novel artifacts such as new knowledge, capabilities, or algorithms, in an…
A great honor to have our book Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned debut as a brand new Japanese edition! Thank you @SakanaAILabs for calling it out! @joelbot3000 and I are thrilled to share our ideas with Japan, and special thanks to the tireless efforts of @miz_oka and @kensuzuki…
Kenneth Stanley & Joel Lehmanによる名著『Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned』の日本語版がBNN社より刊行されました！ 『目標という幻想：未知なる成果をもたらす、〈オープンエンド〉なアプローチ』 監修：岡瑞起、翻訳：牧尾晴喜、解説：岡瑞起・鈴木健 本書は、科学・技術・芸術・ビジネスなど…
My lab is Hiring! I am looking for a research engineer (pre doc) or a postdoc with strong skills in computer vision and state estimation to join our TRUSTLINE project. More info: imperial.ac.uk/jobs/search-jo…
Do you have a PhD (or equivalent) or will have one in the coming months (i.e. 2-3 months away from graduating)? Do you want to help build open-ended agents that help humans do humans things better, rather than replace them? We're hiring 1-2 Research Scientists! Check the 🧵👇
I'll be giving a talk at this exciting workshop tomorrow at ICML and a panel after (with great panelists). Please stop by and say hello! #ICML2025
Join us on July 19th at @icmlconf, Vancouver, for the EXAIT Workshop— a full-day workshop on the role of exploration in AI today.
Becoming an RL diehard in the past year and thinking about RL for most of my waking hours inadvertently taught me an important lesson about how to live my own life. One of the big concepts in RL is that you always want to be “on-policy”: instead of mimicking other people’s…
✨Introducing SENSEI✨ We bring semantically meaningful exploration to model-based RL using VLMs. With intrinsic rewards for novel yet useful behaviors, SENSEI showcases strong exploration in MiniHack, Pokémon Red & Robodesk. Accepted at ICML 2025🎉 Joint work with @cgumbsch 🧵
🚀 Excited to announce our workshop “Embodied World Models for Decision Making” at #NeurIPS2025! 🎉 Keynote speakers, panelists, and content are now live! Check out: 👉 embodied-world-models.github.io #WorldModels #RL #NeurIPS #NeurIPS2025 #neuripsworkshop #workshop
The first big part of my PhD research is out! Infinite thanks to @jeffclune and @cong_ml for all their guidance on this project
Thrilled to introduce Foundation Model Self-Play, led by @_aadharna. FMSPs combine the intelligence & code generation of foundation models with the curriculum of self-play & principles of open-endedness to explore diverse strategies in multi-agent games, like the one below 🧵👇
Thrilled to introduce Foundation Model Self-Play, led by @_aadharna. FMSPs combine the intelligence & code generation of foundation models with the curriculum of self-play & principles of open-endedness to explore diverse strategies in multi-agent games, like the one below 🧵👇
I've now been in research long enough to Schmidhuber Schmiduber!! Life goal achieved. ✅
Hello Jürgen. Very..interesting! That reminds me of this work from my lab long ago (done by a high school student!). Encouraging Creative Thinking in Robots Improves Their Ability to Solve Challenging Problems. Jingyu Li, Jed Storie, Jeff Clune. GECCO 2014…
Since 1990, we have worked on artificial curiosity & measuring „interestingness.“ Our new ICML paper uses "Prediction of Hidden Units" loss to quantify in-context computational complexity in sequence models. It can tell boring from interesting tasks and predict correct reasoning.
Excited to share our new ICML paper, with co-authors @robert_csordas and @SchmidhuberAI! How can we tell if an LLM is actually "thinking" versus just spitting out memorized or trivial text? Can we detect when a model is doing anything interesting? (Thread below👇)
The automation of innovation is within reach! Delighted that my @raais talk is now available for anyone to watch, alongside an excellent blogpost summary by the inimitable @nathanbenaich.
"2025 is the year of open-endedness" at @raais, @edwardfhughes argued that we’re entering a new phase in the evolution of ai: one where open-endedness becomes the central organizing principle. Not just solving problems, but defining them. Not just predicting the next token,…
Sota Singaporean AI researcher list 👇 I made some list two years ago and thought it's time to revisit it with some new names (in no order and no elaborations/cot this time) 1) @isaacongjw from Anthropic 2) @alyssamloo from Anthropic 3) @jennyzhangzt from UBC 4) @tanshawn from…
Scaling AI research agents is key to tackling some of the toughest challenges in the field. But what's required to scale effectively? It turns out that simply throwing more compute at the problem isn't enough. We break down an agent into four fundamental components that shape…