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One Thousand Layer Networks for Self-Supervised RL (arxiv.org)
1 point by johnsutor 308 days ago | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: An agent explores with no rewards or demos and learns to reach commanded goals by stacking up to 1024 layers instead of the usual 2 to 5. On simulated walking and robot tasks, it scored 2 to 50 times better than shallow ones.

Abstract · 1000 Layer Networks for Self-Supervised RL: Scaling Depth Can Enable New Goal-Reaching Capabilities

Scaling up self-supervised learning has driven breakthroughs in language and vision, yet comparable progress has remained elusive in reinforcement learning (RL). In this paper, we study building blocks for self-supervised RL that unlock substantial improvements in scalability, with network depth serving as a critical factor. Whereas most RL papers in recent years have relied on shallow architectures (around 2 - 5 layers), we demonstrate that increasing the depth up to 1024 layers can significantly boost performance. Our experiments are conducted in an unsupervised goal-conditioned setting, where no demonstrations or rewards are provided, so an agent must explore (from scratch) and learn how to maximize the likelihood of reaching commanded goals. Evaluated on simulated locomotion and manipulation tasks, our approach increases performance on the self-supervised contrastive RL algorithm by $2\times$ - $50\times$, outperforming other goal-conditioned baselines. Increasing the model depth not only increases success rates but also qualitatively changes the behaviors learned. The project webpage and code can be found here: https://wang-kevin3290.github.io/scaling-crl/.

Kevin Wang, Ishaan Javali, Michał Bortkiewicz, Tomasz Trzciński, Benjamin Eysenbach
arXiv:2503.14858 · cs.LG, cs.AI · submitted Mar 19, 2025 · updated Feb 2, 2026
abstract · pdf · html · Link to project website: https://wang-kevin3290.github.io/scaling-crl/

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