## The Phenomenon of Policy Churn

### Tom Schaul · Andre Barreto · John Quan · Georg Ostrovski

##### Hall J #907

Keywords: [ Stability ] [ Reinforcement Learning ] [ Policy space ] [ Exploration ] [ deep rl ] [ Deep Learning ]

[ Abstract ]
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Tue 29 Nov 9 a.m. PST — 11 a.m. PST

Abstract: We identify and study the phenomenon of policy churn, that is, the rapid change of the greedy policy in value-based reinforcement learning. Policy churn operates at a surprisingly rapid pace, changing the greedy action in a large fraction of states within a handful of learning updates (in a typical deep RL set-up such as DQN on Atari). We characterise the phenomenon empirically, verifying that it is not limited to specific algorithm or environment properties. A number of ablations help whittle down the plausible explanations on why churn occurs to just a handful, all related to deep learning. Finally, we hypothesise that policy churn is a beneficial but overlooked form of implicit exploration that casts $\epsilon$-greedy exploration in a fresh light, namely that $\epsilon$-noise plays a much smaller role than expected.

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