Turing Award winners Diffie and Barto keynote BAAI Conference on AI security and RL

Turing Award winners Whitfield Diffie and Andrew Barto delivered keynotes at the BAAI Conference on AI security and reinforcement learning.

Diffie argued that today's feedback-based approach only patches programs after they fail, and that formal methods offer a path to substantially more reliable intended behavior.

Barto framed reinforcement learning around control, search, and associative memory, describing its core insight as caching search results rather than searching continuously.