Outstanding Paper Award Winners - 2/2 @ RLC 2025

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 Empirical Reinforcement Learning Research Mitigating Suboptimality of Deterministic Policy Gradients in Complex Q-functions Ayush Jain, Norio Kosaka, Xinhu Li, Kyung-Min Kim, Erdem Biyik, Joseph J Lim Applications of Reinforcement Learning WOFOSTGym: A Crop Simulator for Learning Annual and Perennial Crop Management Strategies William Solow, Sandhya Saisubramanian, Alan Fern Emerging Topics in Reinforcement Learning Towards Improving Reward Design in RL: A Reward Alignment Metric for RL Practitioners Calarina Muslimani, Kerrick Johnstonbaugh, Suyog Chandramouli, Serena Booth, W. Bradley Knox, Matthew E. Taylor Scientific Understanding in Reinforcement Learning Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning Enables Parameter Scaling Reginald McLean, Evangelos Chatzaroulas, J K Terry, Isaac Woungang, Nariman Farsad, Pablo Samuel Castro