On The Presence of Double-Descent in Deep Reinforcement Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Veselý, Viktor, Todorov, Aleksandar, Sabatelli, Matthia
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Veselý, Viktor
Todorov, Aleksandar
Sabatelli, Matthia
author_facet Veselý, Viktor
Todorov, Aleksandar
Sabatelli, Matthia
contents The double descent (DD) paradox, where over-parameterized models see generalization improve past the interpolation point, remains largely unexplored in the non-stationary domain of Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL). We present preliminary evidence that DD exists in model-free DRL, investigating it systematically across varying model capacity using the Actor-Critic framework. We rely on an information-theoretic metric, Policy Entropy, to measure policy uncertainty throughout training. Preliminary results show a clear epoch-wise DD curve; the policy's entrance into the second descent region correlates with a sustained, significant reduction in Policy Entropy. This entropic decay suggests that over-parameterization acts as an implicit regularizer, guiding the policy towards robust, flatter minima in the loss landscape. These findings establish DD as a factor in DRL and provide an information-based mechanism for designing agents that are more general, transferable, and robust.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_06895
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle On The Presence of Double-Descent in Deep Reinforcement Learning
Veselý, Viktor
Todorov, Aleksandar
Sabatelli, Matthia
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
The double descent (DD) paradox, where over-parameterized models see generalization improve past the interpolation point, remains largely unexplored in the non-stationary domain of Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL). We present preliminary evidence that DD exists in model-free DRL, investigating it systematically across varying model capacity using the Actor-Critic framework. We rely on an information-theoretic metric, Policy Entropy, to measure policy uncertainty throughout training. Preliminary results show a clear epoch-wise DD curve; the policy's entrance into the second descent region correlates with a sustained, significant reduction in Policy Entropy. This entropic decay suggests that over-parameterization acts as an implicit regularizer, guiding the policy towards robust, flatter minima in the loss landscape. These findings establish DD as a factor in DRL and provide an information-based mechanism for designing agents that are more general, transferable, and robust.
title On The Presence of Double-Descent in Deep Reinforcement Learning
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.06895