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20202026
most citedRevisiting Rainbow: Promoting more Insightful and Inclusive Deep Reinforcement Learning Research

20 citations · 35 across the 24 of their papers we have counts for

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24 papers · 1 filter

cs.LG2026

Towards Continual Learning: Mitigating Forgetting With Subspace Tuning

Arnav Chavan, Kusha Sareen, Rishabh Tiwari +6

Large language models (LLMs) acquire new skills through fine-tuning, but it can destroy capabilities they already have: catastrophic forgetting remains a central obstacle to contin…

cs.LG2026

Representation Learning Enables Scalable Multitask Deep Reinforcement Learning

Johan Obando-Ceron, Lu Li, Scott Fujimoto +3

Scaling reinforcement learning (RL) to diverse multitask settings remains a central challenge. While recent advances in model-based RL achieve strong performance, they rely on plan…

cs.LG2026

Stable Deep Reinforcement Learning via Isotropic Gaussian Representations

Ali Saheb Pasand, Johan Obando-Ceron, Aaron Courville +2

Deep reinforcement learning systems often suffer from unstable training dynamics due to non-stationarity, where learning objectives and data distributions evolve over time. We show…

cs.LG2025

A Comedy of Estimators: On KL Regularization in RL Training of LLMs

Vedant Shah, Johan Obando-Ceron, Vineet Jain +10

The reasoning performance of large language models (LLMs) can be substantially improved by training them with reinforcement learning (RL). The RL objective for LLM training involve…

cs.LG2025★ 1 cited

Grounding Computer Use Agents on Human Demonstrations

Aarash Feizi, Shravan Nayak, Xiangru Jian +14

Building reliable computer-use agents requires grounding: accurately connecting natural language instructions to the correct on-screen elements. While large datasets exist for web…

cs.LG2025

Simplicial Embeddings Improve Sample Efficiency in Actor-Critic Agents

Johan Obando-Ceron, Walter Mayor, Samuel Lavoie +3

Recent works have proposed accelerating the wall-clock training time of actor-critic methods via the use of large-scale environment parallelization; unfortunately, these can someti…

cs.LG2025

Recursive Self-Aggregation Unlocks Deep Thinking in Large Language Models

Siddarth Venkatraman, Vineet Jain, Sarthak Mittal +9

Test-time scaling methods improve the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) by increasing the amount of compute used during inference to make a prediction. Inference-time co…

cs.LG2025

The Courage to Stop: Overcoming Sunk Cost Fallacy in Deep Reinforcement Learning

Jiashun Liu, Johan Obando-Ceron, Pablo Samuel Castro +2

Off-policy deep reinforcement learning (RL) typically leverages replay buffers for reusing past experiences during learning. This can help improve sample efficiency when the collec…

cs.LG2025

The Impact of On-Policy Parallelized Data Collection on Deep Reinforcement Learning Networks

Walter Mayor, Johan Obando-Ceron, Aaron Courville +1

The use of parallel actors for data collection has been an effective technique used in reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. The manner in which data is collected in these algori…

cs.LG2025

Stable Gradients for Stable Learning at Scale in Deep Reinforcement Learning

Roger Creus Castanyer, Johan Obando-Ceron, Lu Li +4

Scaling deep reinforcement learning networks is challenging and often results in degraded performance, yet the root causes of this failure mode remain poorly understood. Several re…

cs.LG2025

Mitigating Plasticity Loss in Continual Reinforcement Learning by Reducing Churn

Hongyao Tang, Johan Obando-Ceron, Pablo Samuel Castro +2

Plasticity, or the ability of an agent to adapt to new tasks, environments, or distributions, is crucial for continual learning. In this paper, we study the loss of plasticity in d…

cs.LG2025

Measure gradients, not activations! Enhancing neuronal activity in deep reinforcement learning

Jiashun Liu, Zihao Wu, Johan Obando-Ceron +3

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) agents frequently suffer from neuronal activity loss, which impairs their ability to adapt to new data and learn continually. A common method to qu…

cs.LG2025

Adaptive Computation Pruning for the Forgetting Transformer

Zhixuan Lin, Johan Obando-Ceron, Xu Owen He +1

The recently proposed Forgetting Transformer (FoX) incorporates a forget gate into softmax attention and has shown consistently better or on-par performance compared to the standar…

cs.LG2025

Trajectory Balance with Asynchrony: Decoupling Exploration and Learning for Fast, Scalable LLM Post-Training

Brian Bartoldson, Siddarth Venkatraman, James Diffenderfer +7

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a critical component of large language model (LLM) post-training. However, on-policy algorithms used for post-training are not naturally robust to a…

cs.LG2024

Neuroplastic Expansion in Deep Reinforcement Learning

Jiashun Liu, Johan Obando-Ceron, Aaron Courville +1

The loss of plasticity in learning agents, analogous to the solidification of neural pathways in biological brains, significantly impedes learning and adaptation in reinforcement l…

cs.LG2024

Don't flatten, tokenize! Unlocking the key to SoftMoE's efficacy in deep RL

Ghada Sokar, Johan Obando-Ceron, Aaron Courville +2

The use of deep neural networks in reinforcement learning (RL) often suffers from performance degradation as model size increases. While soft mixtures of experts (SoftMoEs) have re…

cs.LG2024★ 1 cited

Mixture of Experts in a Mixture of RL settings

Timon Willi, Johan Obando-Ceron, Jakob Foerster +2

Mixtures of Experts (MoEs) have gained prominence in (self-)supervised learning due to their enhanced inference efficiency, adaptability to distributed training, and modularity. Pr…

cs.LG2024

On the consistency of hyper-parameter selection in value-based deep reinforcement learning

Johan Obando-Ceron, João G. M. Araújo, Aaron Courville +1

Deep reinforcement learning (deep RL) has achieved tremendous success on various domains through a combination of algorithmic design and careful selection of hyper-parameters. Algo…

cs.LG2024

In value-based deep reinforcement learning, a pruned network is a good network

Johan Obando-Ceron, Aaron Courville, Pablo Samuel Castro

Recent work has shown that deep reinforcement learning agents have difficulty in effectively using their network parameters. We leverage prior insights into the advantages of spars…

cs.LG2024★ 3 cited

Mixtures of Experts Unlock Parameter Scaling for Deep RL

Johan Obando-Ceron, Ghada Sokar, Timon Willi +6

The recent rapid progress in (self) supervised learning models is in large part predicted by empirical scaling laws: a model's performance scales proportionally to its size. Analog…

cs.LG2023★ 3 cited

Small batch deep reinforcement learning

Johan Obando-Ceron, Marc G. Bellemare, Pablo Samuel Castro

In value-based deep reinforcement learning with replay memories, the batch size parameter specifies how many transitions to sample for each gradient update. Although critical to th…

cs.LG2023★ 5 cited

Bigger, Better, Faster: Human-level Atari with human-level efficiency

Max Schwarzer, Johan Obando-Ceron, Aaron Courville +3

We introduce a value-based RL agent, which we call BBF, that achieves super-human performance in the Atari 100K benchmark. BBF relies on scaling the neural networks used for value…

cs.LG2023★ 1 cited

JaxPruner: A concise library for sparsity research

Joo Hyung Lee, Wonpyo Park, Nicole Mitchell +22

This paper introduces JaxPruner, an open-source JAX-based pruning and sparse training library for machine learning research. JaxPruner aims to accelerate research on sparse neural…

cs.LG2020★ 20 cited

Revisiting Rainbow: Promoting more Insightful and Inclusive Deep Reinforcement Learning Research

Johan S. Obando-Ceron, Pablo Samuel Castro

Since the introduction of DQN, a vast majority of reinforcement learning research has focused on reinforcement learning with deep neural networks as function approximators. New met…