Formalizing Lines of Research on Generalization in Deep Reinforcement Learning

Reinforcement learning research obtained significant success and attention with the utilization of deep neural networks to solve problems in high dimensional state or action spaces. While deep reinforcement learning policies are currently being deployed in many different fields from medical applications to self driving vehicles, there are still ongoing questions the field is trying to answer on the generalization capabilities of deep reinforcement learning policies. In this paper, we will go over the fundamental reasons why deep reinforcement learning policies encounter overfitting problems that limit their generalization capabilities. Furthermore, we will formalize and unify the manifold solution approaches to increase generalization, and overcome overfitting in deep reinforcement learning policies. We believe our study can provide a compact systematic unified analysis for the current advancements in deep reinforcement learning, and help to construct robust deep neural policies with improved generalization abilities.