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John Quan

9 accepted papers

2026

Rethinking Thinking Tokens: LLMs as Improvement Operators

ICML 2026poster

Reasoning training incentivizes LLMs to produce long chains of thought (long CoT), which among other things, allows them to explore solution strategies with self-checking. This results in higher accuracy, but inflates context length, token/compute cost, and answer latency. We ask: Can current models…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Teaching Models to Teach Themselves: Reasoning at the Edge of Learnability

ICML 2026spotlight

RL methods for finetuning large reasoning models stall on datasets with low initial success rates, and thus little training signal. We investigate a fundamental question: Can a pretrained LLM leverage latent knowledge to generate an automated curriculum for problems it cannot solve? We explore this …

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2021

The Value-Improvement Path: Towards Better Representations for Reinforcement Learning

AAAI 2021technical

In value-based reinforcement learning (RL), unlike in supervised learning, the agent faces not a single, stationary, approximation problem, but a sequence of value prediction problems. Each time the policy improves, the nature of the problem changes, shifting both the distribution of states and thei…

Cited by 73SourcePDFScholar
2019

Recurrent Experience Replay in Distributed Reinforcement Learning

ICLR 2019poster

Building on the recent successes of distributed training of RL agents, in this paper we investigate the training of RNN-based RL agents from distributed prioritized experience replay. We study the effects of parameter lag resulting in representational drift and recurrent state staleness and empirica…

Cited by 629SourcePDFScholar
2019

Universal Successor Features Approximators

ICLR 2019poster

The ability of a reinforcement learning (RL) agent to learn about many reward functions at the same time has many potential benefits, such as the decomposition of complex tasks into simpler ones, the exchange of information between tasks, and the reuse of skills. We focus on one aspect in particular…

Cited by 160SourcePDFScholar
2018

Distributed Prioritized Experience Replay

ICLR 2018poster

We propose a distributed architecture for deep reinforcement learning at scale, that enables agents to learn effectively from orders of magnitude more data than previously possible. The algorithm decouples acting from learning: the actors interact with their own instances of the environment by selec…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2018

Transfer in Deep Reinforcement Learning Using Successor Features and Generalised Policy Improvement

ICML 2018oral

The ability to transfer skills across tasks has the potential to scale up reinforcement learning (RL) agents to environments currently out of reach. Recently, a framework based on two ideas, successor features (SFs) and generalised policy improvement (GPI), has been introduced as a principled way of…

Cited by 224SourcePDFScholar
2017

Distral: Robust multitask reinforcement learning

NeurIPS 2017poster

Most deep reinforcement learning algorithms are data inefficient in complex and rich environments, limiting their applicability to many scenarios. One direction for improving data efficiency is multitask learning with shared neural network parameters, where efficiency may be improved through transfe…

Cited by 677SourcePDFScholar