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Evgenii Nikishin

7 accepted papers

2025

Forgetting Transformer: Softmax Attention with a Forget Gate

ICLR 2025poster

An essential component of modern recurrent sequence models is the forget gate. While Transformers do not have an explicit recurrent form, we show that a forget gate can be naturally incorporated into Transformers by down-weighting the unnormalized attention scores in a data-dependent way. We name th…

2024

The Curse of Diversity in Ensemble-Based Exploration

ICLR 2024poster

We uncover a surprising phenomenon in deep reinforcement learning: training a diverse ensemble of data-sharing agents -- a well-established exploration strategy -- can significantly impair the performance of the individual ensemble members when compared to standard single-agent training. Through car…

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar
2023

Deep Reinforcement Learning with Plasticity Injection

NeurIPS 2023spotlight

A growing body of evidence suggests that neural networks employed in deep reinforcement learning (RL) gradually lose their plasticity, the ability to learn from new data; however, the analysis and mitigation of this phenomenon is hampered by the complex relationship between plasticity, exploration,…

Cited by 53SourcePDFScholar
2023

Sample-Efficient Reinforcement Learning by Breaking the Replay Ratio Barrier

ICLR 2023top-5%

Increasing the replay ratio, the number of updates of an agent's parameters per environment interaction, is an appealing strategy for improving the sample efficiency of deep reinforcement learning algorithms. In this work, we show that fully or partially resetting the parameters of deep reinforcemen…

Cited by 116SourcePDFScholar
2023

Understanding Plasticity in Neural Networks

ICML 2023oral

Plasticity, the ability of a neural network to quickly change its predictions in response to new information, is essential for the adaptability and robustness of deep reinforcement learning systems. Deep neural networks are known to lose plasticity over the course of training even in relatively simp…

Cited by 114SourcePDFScholar
2022

Control-Oriented Model-Based Reinforcement Learning with Implicit Differentiation

AAAI 2022technical

The shortcomings of maximum likelihood estimation in the context of model-based reinforcement learning have been highlighted by an increasing number of papers. When the model class is misspecified or has a limited representational capacity, model parameters with high likelihood might not necessarily…

2022

The Primacy Bias in Deep Reinforcement Learning

ICML 2022spotlight

This work identifies a common flaw of deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms: a tendency to rely on early interactions and ignore useful evidence encountered later. Because of training on progressively growing datasets, deep RL agents incur a risk of overfitting to earlier experiences, negative…