Demo Data from VLDB 2026 / reviewers in the wild / expert
Ivan Masmitja
dblp:219/0921
· DBLP profile ↗
1ranked-venue papers
0as first author
1since 2021 · last 2025
—ORCID · none
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 1 · 1 since 2021
Expertise — from the expertise taxonomy: the topics of the expert's papers under the CCF categories. A weight counts papers with recency: 1 for a paper about the topic, 0.3 when the topic is its context, halved every five years.
| Artificial intelligence
1 paper |
Reinforcement learning · 87% Deep learning architectures and training · 13% |
Topics — the 6 heaviest of 6, each with the papers that count most for it
| Topic | Weight | Papers | Last | Evidence papers |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Machine learning › Reinforcement learning › deep reinforcement learning
deep q-learning |
0.9 | 1 | 2025 | Simplifying Deep Temporal Difference Learning · ICLR 2025 |
Machine learning › Reinforcement learning › temporal difference learning
off-policy TD learning |
0.9 | 1 | 2025 | Simplifying Deep Temporal Difference Learning · ICLR 2025 |
Machine learning › Reinforcement learning
sample efficiency |
0.9 | 1 | 2025 | Simplifying Deep Temporal Difference Learning · ICLR 2025 |
Machine learning › Reinforcement learning
temporal difference learning |
0.9 | 1 | 2025 | Simplifying Deep Temporal Difference Learning · ICLR 2025 |
Machine learning › Deep learning architectures and training › normalization
layer normalization |
0.3 | 1 | 2025 | Simplifying Deep Temporal Difference Learning · ICLR 2025 |
Machine learning › Deep learning architectures and training
regularization |
0.3 | 1 | 2025 | Simplifying Deep Temporal Difference Learning · ICLR 2025 |
Methods — techniques the papers use, named apart from their topics
vectorized environment sampling · 0.9layer normalization · 0.9
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | Simplifying Deep Temporal Difference Learningabstract$Q$-learning played a foundational role in the field reinforcement learning (RL).
However, TD algorithms with off-policy data, such as $Q$-learning, or nonlinear function approximation like deep neural networks require several additional tricks to stabilise training, primarily a large replay buffer and target networks. Unfortunately, the delayed updating of frozen network parameters in the target network harms the sample efficiency and, similarly, the large replay buffer introduces memory and implementation overheads. In this paper, we investigate whether it is possible to accelerate and simplify off-policy TD training while maintaining its stability. Our key theoretical result demonstrates for the first time that regularisation techniques such as LayerNorm can yield provably convergent TD algorithms without the need for a target network or replay buffer, even with off-policy data. Empirically, we find that online, parallelised sampling enabled by vectorised environments stabilises training without the need for a large replay buffer. Motivated by these findings, we propose PQN, our simplified deep online $Q$-Learning algorithm. Surprisingly, this simple algorithm is competitive with more complex methods like: Rainbow in Atari, PPO-RNN in Craftax, QMix in Smax, and can be up to 50x faster than traditional DQN without sacrificing sample efficiency. In an era where PPO has become the go-to RL algorithm, PQN reestablishes off-policy $Q$-learning as a viable alternative. Matteo Gallici, Mattie Fellows, Benjamin Ellis, Bartomeu Pou, Ivan Masmitja, Jakob N. Foerster, Mario Martin |
ICLR | 5 |