← Search

Philemon Brakel

9 accepted papers

2025

Exploiting Policy Idling for Dexterous Manipulation

IROS 2025

Learning based methods for dexterous manipulation have made notable progress in recent years, and they can now produce solutions to complex tasks. However, learned policies often still lack reliability and exhibit limited robustness to important factors of variation. One failure pattern that can be

Cited by 1SourceScholar
2024

Offline Actor-Critic Reinforcement Learning Scales to Large Models

ICML 2024oral

We show that offline actor-critic reinforcement learning can scale to large models - such as transformers - and follows similar scaling laws as supervised learning. We find that offline actor-critic algorithms can outperform strong, supervised, behavioral cloning baselines for multi-task training on…

Cited by 17SourcePDFScholar
2021

A Constrained Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning Framework

CoRL 2021poster

Many real-world problems, especially in robotics, require that reinforcement learning (RL) agents learn policies that not only maximize an environment reward, but also satisfy constraints. We propose a high-level framework for solving such problems, that treats the environment reward and costs as se…

Cited by 34SourceScholar
2019

Recall Traces: Backtracking Models for Efficient Reinforcement Learning

ICLR 2019poster

In many environments only a tiny subset of all states yield high reward. In these cases, few of the interactions with the environment provide a relevant learning signal. Hence, we may want to preferentially train on those high-reward states and the probable trajectories leading to them. To this en…

Cited by 87SourcePDFScholar
2017

A network of deep neural networks for Distant Speech Recognition

ICASSP 2017accepted

Despite the remarkable progress recently made in distant speech recognition, state-of-the-art technology still suffers from a lack of robustness, especially when adverse acoustic conditions characterized by non-stationary noises and reverberation are met. A prominent limitation of current systems li…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2017

An Actor-Critic Algorithm for Sequence Prediction

ICLR 2017poster

We present an approach to training neural networks to generate sequences using actor-critic methods from reinforcement learning (RL). Current log-likelihood training methods are limited by the discrepancy between their training and testing modes, as models must generate tokens conditioned on their p…

Cited by 758SourcecodeScholar
2016

Batch normalized recurrent neural networks

ICASSP 2016accepted

Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) are powerful models for sequential data that have the potential to learn long-term dependencies. However, they are computationally expensive to train and difficult to parallelize. Recent work has shown that normalizing intermediate representations of neural networks…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2016

Deconstructing the Ladder Network Architecture

ICML 2016poster

The Ladder Network is a recent new approach to semi-supervised learning that turned out to be very successful. While showing impressive performance, the Ladder Network has many components intertwined, whose contributions are not obvious in such a complex architecture. This paper presents an extensiv…

Cited by 137SourcePDFScholar
2016

End-to-end attention-based large vocabulary speech recognition

ICASSP 2016accepted

Many state-of-the-art Large Vocabulary Continuous Speech Recognition (LVCSR) Systems are hybrids of neural networks and Hidden Markov Models (HMMs). Recently, more direct end-to-end methods have been investigated, in which neural architectures were trained to model sequences of characters [1,2]. To…

Cited by 0SourceScholar