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Hauptverfasser: Castanyer, Roger Creus, Obando-Ceron, Johan, Li, Lu, Bacon, Pierre-Luc, Berseth, Glen, Courville, Aaron, Castro, Pablo Samuel
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.15544
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author Castanyer, Roger Creus
Obando-Ceron, Johan
Li, Lu
Bacon, Pierre-Luc
Berseth, Glen
Courville, Aaron
Castro, Pablo Samuel
author_facet Castanyer, Roger Creus
Obando-Ceron, Johan
Li, Lu
Bacon, Pierre-Luc
Berseth, Glen
Courville, Aaron
Castro, Pablo Samuel
contents Scaling deep reinforcement learning networks is challenging and often results in degraded performance, yet the root causes of this failure mode remain poorly understood. Several recent works have proposed mechanisms to address this, but they are often complex and fail to highlight the causes underlying this difficulty. In this work, we conduct a series of empirical analyses which suggest that the combination of non-stationarity with gradient pathologies, due to suboptimal architectural choices, underlie the challenges of scale. We propose a series of direct interventions that stabilize gradient flow, enabling robust performance across a range of network depths and widths. Our interventions are simple to implement and compatible with well-established algorithms, and result in an effective mechanism that enables strong performance even at large scales. We validate our findings on a variety of agents and suites of environments.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_15544
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Stable Gradients for Stable Learning at Scale in Deep Reinforcement Learning
Castanyer, Roger Creus
Obando-Ceron, Johan
Li, Lu
Bacon, Pierre-Luc
Berseth, Glen
Courville, Aaron
Castro, Pablo Samuel
Machine Learning
Scaling deep reinforcement learning networks is challenging and often results in degraded performance, yet the root causes of this failure mode remain poorly understood. Several recent works have proposed mechanisms to address this, but they are often complex and fail to highlight the causes underlying this difficulty. In this work, we conduct a series of empirical analyses which suggest that the combination of non-stationarity with gradient pathologies, due to suboptimal architectural choices, underlie the challenges of scale. We propose a series of direct interventions that stabilize gradient flow, enabling robust performance across a range of network depths and widths. Our interventions are simple to implement and compatible with well-established algorithms, and result in an effective mechanism that enables strong performance even at large scales. We validate our findings on a variety of agents and suites of environments.
title Stable Gradients for Stable Learning at Scale in Deep Reinforcement Learning
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.15544