Ruan de Kock

Research engineer @instadeepai focusing on multi-agent systems 🤖

[Ruan de Kock @ruanjohn]

Daniel is an exceptional talent! Have a look at his story.

[InstaDeep @instadeepai]

We're extremely proud to share Daniel's achievement as part of our first oral presentation at @NeurIPSConf, representing an opportunity for AI researchers in Madagascar and across Africa to push new boundaries on the world stage. 🗺️

[InstaDeep @instadeepai]

This year's @NeurIPSConf is nearly here, and we’re thrilled to be contributing to this year’s lineup with our Spotlight paper on MEMENTO.

Lead author @RefiloeShabe explains how incorporating memory can help tackle more challenging routing problems, below. 👇

[InstaDeep @instadeepai]

🧩 Proud to share that our research introducing MEMENTO, a memory-enhanced framework for neural combinatorial optimisation, has been selected as a Spotlight paper at @NeurIPSConf 2025! 🎉

👇 Hear from lead author, @ChalumeauFelix in the video below.

[InstaDeep @instadeepai]

🚀 Proud to share that our research showing how inference-time strategies can break the reinforcement learning performance ceiling has been selected for an oral presentation at @NeurIPSConf 2025! 🎉

👇 Hear from lead authors @ChalumeauFelix and @ruanjohn in the ▶️ below.

🧵⬇️

[InstaDeep @instadeepai]

Ahead of NeurIPS 2025, we’re answering your top questions on Oryx, InstaDeep’s new algorithm for offline multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). 📚

Hear from lead author Claude Formanek about how Oryx selects actions 🤔

[InstaDeep @instadeepai]

Thrilled to announce that Oryx, our best-in-class algorithm for offline multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), has been accepted at @NeurIPSConf 2025! 🎉

Hear directly from lead author @MahjoubOmayma👇

[InstaDeep @instadeepai]

We are heading to @NeurIPSConf 2025! 🎉

Our Africa-based Reinforcement Learning team are making headlines with:

3️⃣ Accepted papers
✨ 1 Spotlight (top 3%)
🎤 And our first-ever Oral presentation at NeurIPS (top 0.3%)!

🧵⬇️

[Deep Learning Indaba @DeepIndaba]

Up next in our Online Learnathon series: Reinforcement Learning in action! 🔥
📌 Session Title: Train an AI Agent to Play Snake using Policy-Based Reinforcement Learning — Part 2
📖 Speakers: @ruanjohn , Sasha Abramowitz, Siddarth Singh, @ArnolFokam , @RefiloeShabe , and Matthew Morris
🕘 Time: Saturday, 13 September | 11 am – 1 pm (UTC+2), add to calendar 👉 https://t.co/bdAGjDBatS

In this hands-on practical, we’ll tackle the limitations of the REINFORCE algorithm and introduce value functions as a solution. Participants will learn to implement the A2C (Advantage Actor-Critic) algorithm, building on the previous session’s codebase, and train an agent to play Snake.
By the end, you’ll understand why A2C improves over REINFORCE and gain practical skills to apply it to real reinforcement learning problems.

✨ Don’t miss this chance to level up your RL knowledge with expert guidance!

[Ruan de Kock @ruanjohn]

@elonmusk @xai Research Engineer?

[AIMS South Africa @AIMSacza]

🎓Huge congratulations to Omer Kamal Ali Ebead and Ayman Saeed, top achievers in AIMS South Africa’s 2024-2025 AI for Science Master’s stream! Africa’s future in AI is in great hands. #AIMSSouthAfrica #AIforScience #AcademicExcellence #STEMinAfrica

[InstaDeep @instadeepai]

The 2025 @DeepIndabaX_ZA saw students and researchers who are passionate about ML innovations coming together in South Africa, with our team taking part in the action across talks, lessons and a hackathon challenge that put participants ML skills to the ultimate test. 🧑‍🔬

[Ruan de Kock @ruanjohn]

@MahjoubOmayma @sMashaZa @khlifi_wiem @liamclarkza @ArnuPretorius 🧑‍🔬 @MahjoubOmayma and @khlifi_wiem will be presenting Sable at #ICML2025.

🗓️Wednesday, 16 July, 4:30 PM PDT
📍West Exhibition Hall B2-B3, Poster Number W-820

#MARL #AI #ICML2025
(8/N)

[Ruan de Kock @ruanjohn]

🚨 Thrilled to share our #ICML2025 paper: "Sable: a Performant, Efficient and Scalable Sequence Model for MARL"!

We introduce a new SOTA cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning algorithm that delivers the advantages of centralised learning without its drawbacks.

(1/N)

[Ruan de Kock @ruanjohn]

@MahjoubOmayma @sMashaZa @khlifi_wiem @liamclarkza @ArnuPretorius If you are interested, have a look at the full paper and code:
📜Paper: https://t.co/kSXjAF3CmD
🧑‍💻Code: https://t.co/rX1V6UB68W
🌐Website/Data: https://t.co/fIozA32XjH

(7/N)

[Deep Learning Indaba𝕏 South Africa @DeepIndabaX_ZA]

This is truly the last chance for students to apply for free attendance at this year's edition. Don't let this final opportunity slip away!

Apply here: https://t.co/y9fJOh9MzP

#Indaba𝕏SA