Daniel Palenicek

Daniel joined the Intelligent Autonomous System lab on October 1st, 2021 as a Ph.D. student. He is part of the 3AI project with Hessian.AI. In his research, Daniel focuses on increasing sample efficiency of model-based reinforcement learning algorithms by studying the impact which model-errors have on the learning.

Before starting his Ph.D., Daniel completed his Bachelor's degree and Master's degree in Wirtschaftsinformatik at the Technische Universität Darmstadt. He wrote his Master's thesis entitled "Dyna-Style Model-Based Reinforcement Learning with Value Expansion" in the Computer Science Department under the supervision of Michael Lutter and Jan Peters. During his studies, Daniel further did two research internships, at the Bosch Center for AI and at Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab London.

Key References

1. Palenicek, D.; Lutter, M.; Carvalho, J.; Peters, J. (2023). Diminishing Return of Value Expansion Methods in Model-Based Reinforcement Learning, International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR).   Download Article [PDF]   BibTeX Reference [BibTex]
2. Palenicek, D.; Lutter, M., Peters, J. (2022). Revisiting Model-based Value Expansion, Multi-disciplinary Conference on Reinforcement Learning and Decision Making (RLDM).   Download Article [PDF]   BibTeX Reference [BibTex]
3. Cowen-Rivers, A.I.; Palenicek, D.; Moens, V.; Abdullah, M.A.; Sootla, A.; Wang, J.; Bou-Ammar, H. (2022). SAMBA: safe model-based & active reinforcement learning, Machine Learning.   Download Article [PDF]   BibTeX Reference [BibTex]
4. Palenicek, D. (2021). A Survey on Constraining Policy Updates Using the KL Divergence, Reinforcement Learning Algorithms: Analysis and Applications, pp.49-57.   Download Article [PDF]   BibTeX Reference [BibTex]
5. Belousov, B.; Abdulsamad H.; Klink, P.; Parisi, S.; Peters, J. (2021). Reinforcement Learning Algorithms: Analysis and Applications, Studies in Computational Intelligence, Springer International Publishing.   Download Article [PDF]   BibTeX Reference [BibTex]
6. Zhou, M.; Luo, J.; Villella, J.; Yang, Y.; Rusu, D.; Miao, J.; Zhang, W.; Alban, M.; Fadakar, I.; Chen, Z.; Chongxi-Huang, A.; Wen, Y.; Hassanzadeh, K.; Graves, D.; Chen, D.; Zhu, Z.; Nguyen, N.; Elsayed, M.; Shao, K.; Ahilan, S.; Zhang, B.; Wu, J.; Fu, Z.; Rezaee, K.; Yadmellat, P.; Rohani, M.; Perez-Nieves, N.; Ni, Y.; Banijamali, S.; Cowen-Rivers, A.; Tian, Z.; Palenicek, D.; Bou-Ammar, H.; Zhang, H.; Liu, W.; Hao, J.; Wang, J. (2020). SMARTS: Scalable Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Training School for Autonomous Driving. Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL). Best System Paper Award. Download Article

Teaching Assistant

• Statistical Machine Learning (SS 2023)
• Computational Engineering and Robotics (SS 2022, WS 2022/2023)