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Over the past few years, Batch-Normalization has been commonly used in deep networks, allowing faster training and high performance for a wide variety of applications. However, the reasons behind its merits remained unanswered, with several…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-02-08 Elad Hoffer , Ron Banner , Itay Golan , Daniel Soudry

Using a high Update-To-Data (UTD) ratio, model-based methods have recently achieved much higher sample efficiency than previous model-free methods for continuous-action DRL benchmarks. In this paper, we introduce a simple model-free…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-19 Xinyue Chen , Che Wang , Zijian Zhou , Keith Ross

Model-free reinforcement learning has been successfully applied to a range of challenging problems, and has recently been extended to handle large neural network policies and value functions. However, the sample complexity of model-free…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-03-03 Shixiang Gu , Timothy Lillicrap , Ilya Sutskever , Sergey Levine

Importance sampling is widely used to improve the efficiency of deep neural network (DNN) training by reducing the variance of gradient estimators. However, efficiently assessing the variance reduction relative to uniform sampling remains…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-19 Takuro Kutsuna

Regularization is a fundamental technique to prevent over-fitting and to improve generalization performances by constraining a model's complexity. Current Deep Networks heavily rely on regularizers such as Data-Augmentation (DA) or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-12 Randall Balestriero , Leon Bottou , Yann LeCun

This paper considers a class of reinforcement learning problems, which involve systems with two types of states: stochastic and pseudo-stochastic. In such systems, stochastic states follow a stochastic transition kernel while the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-09 Honghao Wei , Xin Liu , Weina Wang , Lei Ying

The reliability of neural networks is essential for their use in safety-critical applications. Existing approaches generally aim at improving the robustness of neural networks to either real-world distribution shifts (e.g., common…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-20 Leo Schwinn , Leon Bungert , An Nguyen , René Raab , Falk Pulsmeyer , Doina Precup , Björn Eskofier , Dario Zanca

Modern meta-learning approaches for image classification rely on increasingly deep networks to achieve state-of-the-art performance, making batch normalization an essential component of meta-learning pipelines. However, the hierarchical…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-07-14 John Bronskill , Jonathan Gordon , James Requeima , Sebastian Nowozin , Richard E. Turner

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) often requires a large number of data and environment interactions, making the training process time-consuming. This challenge is further exacerbated in the case of batch RL, where the agent is trained…

Batch Normalization (BatchNorm) is a widely adopted technique that enables faster and more stable training of deep neural networks (DNNs). Despite its pervasiveness, the exact reasons for BatchNorm's effectiveness are still poorly…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-04-16 Shibani Santurkar , Dimitris Tsipras , Andrew Ilyas , Aleksander Madry

Recent advances in model-free deep reinforcement learning (DRL) show that simple model-free methods can be highly effective in challenging high-dimensional continuous control tasks. In particular, Truncated Quantile Critics (TQC) achieves…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-18 Yanqiu Wu , Xinyue Chen , Che Wang , Yiming Zhang , Keith W. Ross

In temporal-difference reinforcement learning algorithms, variance in value estimation can cause instability and overestimation of the maximal target value. Many algorithms have been proposed to reduce overestimation, including several…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-19 Litian Liang , Yaosheng Xu , Stephen McAleer , Dailin Hu , Alexander Ihler , Pieter Abbeel , Roy Fox

Data augmentation (DA) is a crucial technique for enhancing the sample efficiency of visual reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. Notably, employing simple observation transformations alone can yield outstanding performance without extra…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-30 Guozheng Ma , Linrui Zhang , Haoyu Wang , Lu Li , Zilin Wang , Zhen Wang , Li Shen , Xueqian Wang , Dacheng Tao

The breakthrough of deep Q-Learning on different types of environments revolutionized the algorithmic design of Reinforcement Learning to introduce more stable and robust algorithms, to that end many extensions to deep Q-Learning algorithm…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-16 Mohammed Sabry , Amr M. A. Khalifa

Deep Q-learning algorithms remain notoriously unstable, especially during early training when the maximization operator amplifies estimation errors. Inspired by bounded rationality theory and developmental learning, we introduce Sat-EnQ, a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-30 Ünver Çiftçi

The method introduced in this paper aims at helping deep learning practitioners faced with an overfit problem. The idea is to replace, in a multi-branch network, the standard summation of parallel branches with a stochastic affine…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-05-24 Xavier Gastaldi

A critical and challenging problem in reinforcement learning is how to learn the state-action value function from the experience replay buffer and simultaneously keep sample efficiency and faster convergence to a high quality solution. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-04-25 Weichao Li , Fuxian Huang , Xi Li , Gang Pan , Fei Wu

Machine learning, especially deep neural networks, has been rapidly developed in fields including computer vision, speech recognition and reinforcement learning. Although Mini-batch SGD is one of the most popular stochastic optimization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-12 Xinyu Peng , Li Li , Fei-Yue Wang

High update-to-data (UTD) ratio algorithms in reinforcement learning (RL) improve sample efficiency but incur high computational costs, limiting real-world scalability. We propose Offline Stabilization Phases for Efficient Q-Learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-19 Carlo Romeo , Girolamo Macaluso , Alessandro Sestini , Andrew D. Bagdanov

Using deep neural nets as function approximator for reinforcement learning tasks have recently been shown to be very powerful for solving problems approaching real-world complexity. Using these results as a benchmark, we discuss the role…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-01-21 Vincent François-Lavet , Raphael Fonteneau , Damien Ernst