Recent years have witnessed significant progresses in deep Reinforcement Learning (RL). Empowered with large scale neural networks, carefully designed architectures, novel training algorithms and massively parallel computing devices, researchers are able to attack many challenging RL problems. However, in machine learning, more training power comes with a potential risk of more overfitting. As deep RL techniques are being applied to critical problems such as healthcare and finance, it is important to understand the generalization behaviors of the trained agents. In this paper, we conduct a systematic study of standard RL agents and find that they could overfit in various ways. Moreover, overfitting could happen ``robustly'': commonly used techniques in RL that add stochasticity do not necessarily prevent or detect overfitting. In particular, the same agents and learning algorithms could have drastically different test performance, even when all of them achieve optimal rewards during training. The observations call for more principled and careful evaluation protocols in RL. We conclude with a general discussion on overfitting in RL and a study of the generalization behaviors from the perspective of inductive bias.

本论文对深度强化学习的过拟合现象进行了系统研究，发现过拟合可能会以不同方式发生，并且常用的随机性技术不一定能有效检测或预防过拟合，因此需要更加严谨的评估协议并研究感性偏差对泛化行为的影响。

深度强化学习中过拟合的研究