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Regularization in DQN for Parameter-Varying Control Learning Tasks

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Advances in Neural Networks – ISNN 2019 (ISNN 2019)

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Abstract

As an important technique of preventing overfitting, regularization is widely used in supervised learning. However, regularization has not been systematically studied in deep reinforcement learning (deep RL). In this paper, we study the generalization of deep Q-network (DQN), applying with mainstream regularization approaches, including l1, l2 and dropout. We pay attention on agent’s performance not only in original environments, but also in parameter-varying environments which are variational but the same task type. Furthermore, the dropout is modified to make it more adaptive to DQN. Then, a new dropout is proposed to speed up the optimization of DQN. Experiments show that regularization helps deep RL achieve better performance in both original and parameter-varying environments when the number of samples is insufficient.

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Acknowledgements

This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (61873022, 61573052), the Beijing Natural Science Foundation (4182045), the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2018M640049) and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (XK1802-4, ZY1839).

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Correspondence to Dazi Li .

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Li, D., Lei, C., Jin, Q., Han, M. (2019). Regularization in DQN for Parameter-Varying Control Learning Tasks. In: Lu, H., Tang, H., Wang, Z. (eds) Advances in Neural Networks – ISNN 2019. ISNN 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11555. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22808-8_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22808-8_4

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-22807-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-22808-8

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