Increasing Policy Network Size Does not Guarantee Better Performance in Deep Reinforcement Learning

Zachery Berg, Purdue University

Abstract

The capacity of deep reinforcement learning policy networks has been found to affect the performance of trained agents. It has been observed that policy networks with more parameters have better training performance and generalization ability than smaller networks. In this work, we find cases where this does not hold true. We observe unimodal variance in the zero-shot test return of varying width policies, which accompanies a drop in both train and test return. Empirically, we demonstrate mostly monotonically increasing performance or mostly optimal performance as the width of deep policy networks increase, except near the variance mode. Finally, we find a scenario where larger networks have increasing performance up to a point, then decreasing performance. We hypothesize that these observations align with the theory of double descent in supervised learning, although with specific differences.

Degree

M.Sc.

Advisors

Xue, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Agronomy|Artificial intelligence|Educational administration|Operations research

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