We caught up with the RLC Outstanding Paper award winners for your listening pleasure. 

Recorded on location at Reinforcement Learning Conference 2025, at University of Alberta, in Edmonton Alberta Canada in August 2025.

Featured References 

Scientific Understanding in Reinforcement Learning 
How Should We Meta-Learn Reinforcement Learning Algorithms? 
Alexander David Goldie, Zilin Wang, Jakob Nicolaus Foerster, Shimon Whiteson 

Tooling, Environments, and Evaluation for Reinforcement Learning 
Syllabus: Portable Curricula for Reinforcement Learning Agents 
Ryan Sullivan, Ryan Pégoud, Ameen Ur Rehman, Xinchen Yang, Junyun Huang, Aayush Verma, Nistha Mitra, John P Dickerson 

Resourcefulness in Reinforcement Learning 
PufferLib 2.0: Reinforcement Learning at 1M steps/s 
Joseph Suarez 

Theory of Reinforcement Learning 
Deep Reinforcement Learning with Gradient  Eligibility Traces  
Esraa Elelimy, Brett Daley, Andrew Patterson, Marlos C. Machado, Adam White, Martha White