Daniel Palenicek

I am a fifth-year PhD student at TU Darmstadt & hessian.AI supervised by Prof. Jan Peters. During my PhD I have been working on sample-efficient reinforcement learning for robotics. I was selected as a 2026-2027 NVIDIA Graduate Fellowship Finalist.

CV [09/2025] LinkedIn Scholar GitHub X

Short CV

2026—Now Research Scientist Intern Meta FAIR, New York

2021—Now PhD Student TU Darmstadt & hessian.AI

2019—2020 Research Intern Huawei R&D London

2019 Research Intern Bosch Center for AI, Renningen

2015—2021 M.Sc. Wirtschaftsinformatik TU Darmstadt

📄 Selected Publications

XQC: Well-Conditioned Optimization Accelerates Deep Reinforcement Learning

Palenicek D., Vogt F., Watson J., Posner I., Peters J.

ICLR 2026

Paper Project Page

Scaling Off-Policy Reinforcement Learning with Batch and Weight Normalization

Palenicek D., Vogt F., Watson J., Peters J.

NeurIPS 2025

Paper

Gait in Eight: Efficient On-Robot Learning for Omnidirectional Quadruped Locomotion

Bohlinger N.*, Kinzel J.*, Palenicek D., Antczak L., Peters J.

IROS 2025

Paper Project Page

Towards Safe Robot Foundation Models Using Inductive Biases

Palenicek D.*, Tölle M.*, Gruner T.*, Schneider T., Günster J., Watson J., Tateo D., Liu P., Peters J.

Safe-VLM Workshop @ ICRA 2025Spotlight & GRC 2025

Paper Project Page

CrossQ: Batch Normalization in Deep Reinforcement Learning for Greater Sample Efficiency and Simplicity

Palenicek D.*, Bhatt A.*, Belousov B., Argus M., Amiranashvili A., Brox T., Peters J.

ICLR 2024Spotlight

Paper Code Webpage

Learning Tactile Insertion in the Real World

Palenicek D.*, Gruner T.*, Schneider T.*, Böhm A.*, Lenz J.*, Pfenning I.*, Krämer E., Peters J.

ICRA@40 & ViTac Workshop @ ICRA 2024

Paper

Diminishing Return of Value Expansion Methods in Model-Based Reinforcement Learning

Palenicek D., Lutter M., Carvalho J., Peters J.

ICLR 2023

Paper Code

See Google Scholar for complete list.

🎤 Talks

Sample Efficiency in Deep RL: Quo Vadis? / link

BeNeRL Seminar Series, September 2024

CrossQ: Batch Normalization in Deep Reinforcement Learning / link

ML&AI Academy, February 2024

AI and its faces (interview) / link

hessian.AI, with Theo Gruner, August 2023

Slurm-tastic Adventures on the IAS Cluster / link

IWIALS (Workshop on Intelligent Autonomous Systems), August 2023