Common Challenges of Deep Reinforcement Learning Applications Development: An Empirical Study

Fuente: arXiv
Gespeichert in:
Bibliographische Detailangaben
Hauptverfasser: Morovati, Mohammad Mehdi, Tambon, Florian, Taraghi, Mina, Nikanjam, Amin, Khomh, Foutse
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2023
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:
Tags: Tag hinzufügen
Keine Tags, Fügen Sie den ersten Tag hinzu!
_version_ 1866916250810056704
author Morovati, Mohammad Mehdi
Tambon, Florian
Taraghi, Mina
Nikanjam, Amin
Khomh, Foutse
author_facet Morovati, Mohammad Mehdi
Tambon, Florian
Taraghi, Mina
Nikanjam, Amin
Khomh, Foutse
contents Machine Learning (ML) is increasingly being adopted in different industries. Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) is a subdomain of ML used to produce intelligent agents. Despite recent developments in DRL technology, the main challenges that developers face in the development of DRL applications are still unknown. To fill this gap, in this paper, we conduct a large-scale empirical study of 927 DRL-related posts extracted from Stack Overflow, the most popular Q&A platform in the software community. Through the process of labeling and categorizing extracted posts, we created a taxonomy of common challenges encountered in the development of DRL applications, along with their corresponding popularity levels. This taxonomy has been validated through a survey involving 65 DRL developers. Results show that at least 45% of developers experienced 18 of the 21 challenges identified in the taxonomy. The most frequent source of difficulty during the development of DRL applications are Comprehension, API usage, and Design problems, while Parallel processing, and DRL libraries/frameworks are classified as the most difficult challenges to address, with respect to the time required to receive an accepted answer. We hope that the research community will leverage this taxonomy to develop efficient strategies to address the identified challenges and improve the quality of DRL applications.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2310_09575
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Common Challenges of Deep Reinforcement Learning Applications Development: An Empirical Study
Morovati, Mohammad Mehdi
Tambon, Florian
Taraghi, Mina
Nikanjam, Amin
Khomh, Foutse
Software Engineering
Machine Learning (ML) is increasingly being adopted in different industries. Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) is a subdomain of ML used to produce intelligent agents. Despite recent developments in DRL technology, the main challenges that developers face in the development of DRL applications are still unknown. To fill this gap, in this paper, we conduct a large-scale empirical study of 927 DRL-related posts extracted from Stack Overflow, the most popular Q&A platform in the software community. Through the process of labeling and categorizing extracted posts, we created a taxonomy of common challenges encountered in the development of DRL applications, along with their corresponding popularity levels. This taxonomy has been validated through a survey involving 65 DRL developers. Results show that at least 45% of developers experienced 18 of the 21 challenges identified in the taxonomy. The most frequent source of difficulty during the development of DRL applications are Comprehension, API usage, and Design problems, while Parallel processing, and DRL libraries/frameworks are classified as the most difficult challenges to address, with respect to the time required to receive an accepted answer. We hope that the research community will leverage this taxonomy to develop efficient strategies to address the identified challenges and improve the quality of DRL applications.
title Common Challenges of Deep Reinforcement Learning Applications Development: An Empirical Study
topic Software Engineering
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.09575