An Empirical Study on Hyperparameters and their Interdependence for RL Generalization

Abstract

Recent results in Reinforcement Learning (RL) have shown that agents with limited training environments are susceptible to a large amount of overfitting across many domains. A key challenge for RL generalization is to quantitatively explain the effects of changing parameters on testing performance. Such parameters include architecture, regularization, and RL-dependent variables such as discount factor and action stochasticity. We provide empirical results that show complex and interdependent relationships between hyperparameters and generalization. We further show that several empirical metrics such as gradient cosine similarity and trajectory-dependent metrics serve to provide intuition towards these results.