Characterizing the Action-Generalization Gap in Deep Q-Learning
We study the action generalization ability of deep Q-learning in discrete action spaces. Generalization is crucial for efficient reinforcement learning (RL) because it allows agents to use knowledge learned from past experiences on new tasks. But while function approximation provides deep RL agents with a natural way to generalize over state inputs, the same generalization mechanism does not apply to discrete action outputs. And yet, surprisingly, our experiments indicate that Deep Q-Networks (DQN), which use exactly this type of function approximator, are still able to achieve modest action generalization. Our main contribution is twofold: first, we propose a method of evaluating action generalization using expert knowledge of action similarity, and empirically confirm that action generalization leads to faster learning; second, we characterize the action-generalization gap (the difference in learning performance between DQN and the expert) in different domains. We find that DQN can indeed generalize over actions in several simple domains, but that its ability to do so decreases as the action space grows larger.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Tasks
Q-LearningReinforcement Learning (RL)Methods 이 논문이 사용한 방법론
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
CultureVLM: Characterizing and Improving Cultural Understanding of Vision-Language Models for over 100 Countries
Vision-language models (VLMs) have advanced human-AI interaction but struggle with cultural understanding, often misinterpreting symbols, gestures, and artifacts due to biases in predominantly Western-centric training da…
Characterizing Generalization under Out-Of-Distribution Shifts in Deep Metric Learning
Deep Metric Learning (DML) aims to find representations suitable for zero-shot transfer to a priori unknown test distributions. However, common evaluation protocols only test a single, fixed data split in which train and…
Metric LearningGeneralization Analysis of Machine Learning Algorithms via the Worst-Case Data-Generating Probability Measure
In this paper, the worst-case probability measure over the data is introduced as a tool for characterizing the generalization capabilities of machine learning algorithms. More specifically, the worst-case probability mea…
SensitivityDisentangling Epistemic and Aleatoric Uncertainty in Reinforcement Learning
Characterizing aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty on the predicted rewards can help in building reliable reinforcement learning (RL) systems. Aleatoric uncertainty results from the irreducible environment stochasticity …
reinforcement-learningReinforcement LearningReinforcement Learning (RL)Measuring and Characterizing Generalization in Deep Reinforcement Learning
Deep reinforcement-learning methods have achieved remarkable performance on challenging control tasks. Observations of the resulting behavior give the impression that the agent has constructed a generalized representatio…
Deep Reinforcement Learningreinforcement-learningReinforcement LearningReinforcement Learning (RL)+1