arXiv:2608. 07335v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advancements in deep reinforcement learning have increasingly favored simplified, highly parallelized paradigms.
By Taha Shieenavaz, Shabnam Zareshahraki, Loris Nanni
arXiv:2608. 03069v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep Q-Networks (DQNs) learn value functions through bootstrapped temporal-difference updates, where future returns are approximated using a greedy maximization over next-state action values.
By Lipeng Zu, Xiaonan Zhang
The paper presents Aftab, a new architecture for replay‑free parallelized Q‑learning that systematically explores visual encoder designs, multiplicative feature interactions, and value‑estimation strategies. Through a three‑phase study on Atari‑57, the authors compare eight convolutional encoders, integrate Hadamax‑style interactions, and evaluate categorical‑dueling, ensemble‑dueling, and combined configurations, ultimately achieving a higher human‑normalized score than the baseline PQN. Aftab is also evaluated on Procgen Hard, showing improved terminal IQM and learning‑curve area, and the full framework is released as open source.
By Taha Shieenavaz, Shabnam Zareshahraki, Loris Nanni
The paper presents a three‑phase study of visual encoders and value‑estimation methods for replay‑free parallelized Q‑learning within the Parallelized Q‑Network framework. It compares eight convolutional encoder topologies, adds Hadamax‑style multiplicative interactions and pooling, and evaluates categorical‑dueling, ensemble‑dueling, and categorical ensemble‑dueling value‑estimation configurations. The resulting architecture, Aftab, outperforms a baseline PQN on Atari‑57 and shows improved performance on Procgen Hard, demonstrating that visual topology, multiplicative representation, and downstream value‑estimation design significantly influence replay‑free Q‑learning when considered alongside computational complexity.
By Taha Shieenavaz, Shabnam Zareshahraki, Loris Nanni
arXiv:2609.06421v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Batch normalization (BN) substantially improves sample efficiency in continuous-control actor-critic methods such as CrossQ, yet recent studies repor...
By Daniel Palenicek, Mikael Henaff, Scott Fujimoto, Koustuv Sinha
arXiv:2606. 29806v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Action-values are foundational to many control algorithms such as Q-learning.
By Prabhat Nagarajan, Brett Daley, Martha White, Marlos C. Machado