# Tag Info

5

Q-learning is guaranteed to converge (in the tabular case) under some mild conditions, one of which is that in the limit we visit each state-action tuple infinitely many times. If your random random policy (i.e. 100% exploration) is guaranteeing this and the other conditions are met (which they probably are) then Q-learning will converge. The reason that ...

5

Why is this a convergence criterion? It is because $R$ and $S'$ are stochastic. A large learning rate applied when these values have variance would not converge to mean, but would wander around typically within some value proportional to $\alpha\sigma$ of the true value, where $\sigma$ is the standard deviation of the term $R + \gamma\text{max}_aQ(S',a)$. ...

4

The true answers are 1 and 3. 1 because the required conditions for tabular Q-learning to converge is that each state action pair will be visited infinitely often, and Q-learning learns directly about the greedy policy, $\pi(a|s) := \arg \max_a Q_\pi(s,a)$, and because Q-learning converges to the optimal Q-value function we know that the policy will be ...

4

A typical and practical way to measure the convergence to some solution (so not necessarily the optimal one!) of any numerical iterative algorithm (such as RL algorithms) is to check if the current solution has not changed (much) with respect to the previous one. In your case, the solutions are value functions, so you could check if your algorithm has ...

3

There are many ideas to escape from local optima in GA. One solution is selecting the population for the next iteration based on the probability that is defined based on the individual score. In that case, you have a chance to select a bad score individual to escape from the local optima. Another efficient solution is playing with the mutation rate to get ...

3

In the discussion about Neil Slater's answer (that he, sadly, deleted) it was pointed out that the policy $\pi$ should also depend on the horizon $h$. The decision of action $a$ can be influenced by how many steps are left. So, the "policy" in that case is actually a collection of policies $\pi_h(a|s)$ indexed by $h$ - the distance to horizon. ...

2

If anything, you want the learning rate to decrease as the number of iterations increases. When you're looking for a good spot and you're clueless, take large steps. When you've found a pretty good spot, take small steps, so you don't end up far away. In other fields of machine learning, there are studies of how the learning rate should scale. For example, ...

1

Even if the mean of the maximum Q-value increases from episode 300 onwards, it doesn't mean that the relative order of the Q-values of the actions that you can take in the states change, which means that the policy may not change, even though the value function changes, assuming you're acting greedily with respect to the value function. More concretely, ...

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