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Daniel Palenicek

9 accepted papers

2026

FlashSAC: Fast and Stable Off-Policy Reinforcement Learning for High-Dimensional Robot Control

RSS 2026poster

Simulation-based reinforcement learning (RL) is central for robotic control when expert demonstrations are unavailable. However, scaling RL to high-dimensional robots remains challenging. On-policy methods such as PPO are reliable but require large amounts of simulation because they discard past dat…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

XQC: Well-conditioned Optimization Accelerates Deep Reinforcement Learning

ICLR 2026poster

Sample efficiency is a central property of effective deep reinforcement learning algorithms. Recent work has improved this through added complexity, such as larger models, exotic network architectures, and more complex algorithms, which are typically motivated purely by empirical performance. We tak…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

DIME: Diffusion-Based Maximum Entropy Reinforcement Learning

ICML 2025poster

Maximum entropy reinforcement learning (MaxEnt-RL) has become the standard approach to RL due to its beneficial exploration properties. Traditionally, policies are parameterized using Gaussian distributions, which significantly limits their representational capacity. Diffusion-based policies offer a…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Gait in Eight: Efficient On-Robot Learning for Omnidirectional Quadruped Locomotion

IROS 2025

On-robot Reinforcement Learning is a promising approach to train embodiment-aware policies for legged robots. However, the computational constraints of real-time learning on robots pose a significant challenge. We present a framework for efficiently learning quadruped locomotion in just 8 minutes of

Cited by 7SourcecodeScholar
2025

Scaling Off-Policy Reinforcement Learning with Batch and Weight Normalization

NeurIPS 2025poster

Reinforcement learning has achieved significant milestones, but sample efficiency remains a bottleneck for real-world applications. Recently, CrossQ has demonstrated state-of-the-art sample efficiency with a low update-to-data (UTD) ratio of 1. In this work, we explore CrossQ's scaling behavior with…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

CrossQ: Batch Normalization in Deep Reinforcement Learning for Greater Sample Efficiency and Simplicity

ICLR 2024spotlight

Sample efficiency is a crucial problem in deep reinforcement learning. Recent algorithms, such as REDQ and DroQ, found a way to improve the sample efficiency by increasing the update-to-data (UTD) ratio to 20 gradient update steps on the critic per environment sample. However, this comes at the expe…

2023

Diminishing Return of Value Expansion Methods in Model-Based Reinforcement Learning

ICLR 2023poster

Model-based reinforcement learning is one approach to increase sample efficiency. However, the accuracy of the dynamics model and the resulting compounding error over modelled trajectories are commonly regarded as key limitations. A natural question to ask is: How much more sample efficiency can be…

2020

SMARTS: An Open-Source Scalable Multi-Agent RL Training School for Autonomous Driving

CoRL 2020

Interaction is fundamental in autonomous driving (AD). Despite more than a decade of intensive R&D in AD, how to dynamically interact with diverse road users in various contexts still remains unsolved. Multi-agent learning has recently seen big breakthroughs and has much to offer towards solving rea