#PaperADay 2
2026: Deep Delta Learning
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00417 The standard residual network blocks are limited to adding on top of the existing state, which limits the expressivity of each layer. It is still a universal approximator, but we can always hope for function blocks
@id_aa_carmack
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Deep Delta Learning: Beyond Standard Residual Blocks
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Reading Bookmarked Papers: Weekly Challenge for January
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I like and bookmark so many interesting sounding papers here, and don’t get back to most of them. Time to start making a dent. I’m going to try to at least skim one of the papers in my bookmarks each weekday for the rest of the month.#PaperADay
— John Carmack (@ID_AA_Carmack) 8 janvier 2026
2025: Emergent temporal… https://t.co/WUu7EXVEDWI like and bookmark so many interesting sounding papers here, and don’t get back to most of them. Time to start making a dent. I’m going to try to at least skim one of the papers in my bookmarks each weekday for the rest of the month. #PaperADay 2025: Emergent temporal
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Simulation Work Requires Understanding True Performance Gap
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I still think most work should be done in simulation, but it is crucial to calibrate your understanding of the true gap!
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Evaluating RL Performance: Challenges in Benchmarking Improvements
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Thanks — I always half expect someone to pop up say “we just cloned this other repo and ran it for a 50% performance improvement”. With RL it is very hard to know what “good performance” is.
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Hyperparameter Tuning and Agent Performance Limitations
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I don’t want to take too much credit — hyperparameter tuning for any given algorithm is a big deal, and I’m sure the others can perform well with more effort. I also have much better performing agents, but they won’t run on a laptop.
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RL Team Replicates Physical Atari Work, Compares Baseline Agent
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Another RL team replicated our Physical Atari work and compared my baseline agent against several standard algorithms. https://
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PyTorch’s Signed 64-bit Index Standardization Decision
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Pytorch made the right call standardizing on signed 64 bit indexes. I would probably still be rather pointlessly making case by case decisions to use int32 if it were an option. Some old habits linger.
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Papers Rejected for Legal Code Instead of Greek Pseudocode
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Would papers get rejected if they used legal code with variable names instead of Greek laden pseudo code?
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All Learning Happens Online Without Pretraining or Transfer
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It’s ALL online learning in nature — no pretraining and transfer.
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Physical Atari RL Framework: Simulation Transfer Challenges
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Some interesting experiments with our “physical Atari” RL framework — one of our main points was that the flawless simulators didn’t transfer well at all to the messy reality of cameras and servos, but perhaps less obviously, even transferring from one robotroller to a second,