Meta request to authors: please define your acronyms at least once!

Even in scientific domains where a high level of background knowledge is expected, it is standard practice to define each acronym prior to its use in the rest of the paper, for example “using three-letter acronyms (TLAs) without first defining them is a hindrance to readability.”

Alessandra Sierra has a great piece on this:

https://www.lambdasierra.com/2023/abbreviating/

Couldn’t agree more. Had a hell of a time looking at how they were using RL after first use, but gave up in frustration when the remainder of the text was more use of undefined symbols/acronyms.

On this note - what's "i.i.d."?

I believe this is referring to the probability concept of "Independent and Identically distributed".

In the usage in the book/page, it seems to refer to how tasks/problems are run in parallel and the learning averaged, whereas the author is advocating these problems run sequentially.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_and_identically_di...

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