Written quickly for the Inkhaven Residency.

One of the things I like most about LessWrong yearly reviews is that they occur a full year after: for example, the reviews for posts written in 2019 happen at the end of 2020; we just reviewed the posts for 2024. As the LessWrong team writes:

LessWrong has the goal of making intellectual progress on important problems. To make progress, you gotta examine your community's outputs not only when they're first published, but also once enough time has passed to see whether they continued to provide value after initial hype fades and flaws have had time to surface.

In contrast, most of the research post-mortems I’ve seen happen right after the paper is completed.[1] This means it's easy to focus too much on its immediate reception or on specific project management and execution issues, rather than higher-level judgments that went into picking the overall research direction or general approach.

So today, I decided to do a very belated public post-mortem of my earliest published machine learning research paper “The Assistive Multi-Armed Bandit”, which studied a toy version of assistance games/Cooperative Inverse Reinforcement Learning (CIRL), where the human didn’t know what their own [...]

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Outline:

(02:00) Context

(04:50) Project Timeline

(10:46) Whats happened since?

The original text contained 11 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
April 17th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/k8SbrC8EMq2RpCmNg/post-mortem-ing-my-earliest-ml-research-paper-7-years-later

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Images from the article:

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“Post-mortem’ing my earliest ML research paper, 7 years later” by LawrenceC

LessWrong (30+ Karma)

“Post-mortem’ing my earliest ML research paper, 7 years later” by LawrenceC