Waterloo's R2L Lab to Recruit PhDs, Focusing on Agents and Reasoning Research
hllo_wrld · x · 2026-08-01
The R2L Lab at the University of Waterloo announced it will recruit 1-2 PhD students this September and will be present at upcoming academic conferences like VLDB and COLM.
The lab focuses on building generalist agents that read, reason, and act across digital and physical environments. Recent key research includes:
- AgentIR: Enabling deep research agents to explain their intent before searching, and training retrievers to use this reasoning to improve search outcomes.
- Workflow Evaluation: Creating benchmarks like Spider 2 (enterprise text-to-SQL), OSWorld, and Computer Agent Arena.
- Generalization: Studying test-time adaptation for agents facing unseen environments.
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