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Deep reinforcement learning and the deadly triad

14 Pith papers cite this work. Polarity classification is still indexing.

14 Pith papers citing it
abstract

We know from reinforcement learning theory that temporal difference learning can fail in certain cases. Sutton and Barto (2018) identify a deadly triad of function approximation, bootstrapping, and off-policy learning. When these three properties are combined, learning can diverge with the value estimates becoming unbounded. However, several algorithms successfully combine these three properties, which indicates that there is at least a partial gap in our understanding. In this work, we investigate the impact of the deadly triad in practice, in the context of a family of popular deep reinforcement learning models - deep Q-networks trained with experience replay - analysing how the components of this system play a role in the emergence of the deadly triad, and in the agent's performance

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representative citing papers

Learning Agentic Policy from Action Guidance

cs.CL · 2026-05-12 · unverdicted · novelty 7.0

ActGuide-RL uses human action data as plan-style guidance in mixed-policy RL to overcome exploration barriers in LLM agents, matching SFT+RL performance on search benchmarks without cold-start training.

Behavior-Consistent Deep Reinforcement Learning

cs.LG · 2026-05-20 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0 · 2 refs

QED bounds cross-run KL divergence in Boltzmann policies by setting temperature proportional to Q-disagreement and reduces return variance by two orders of magnitude on 18 continuous-control tasks without performance loss.

AdamO: A Collapse-Suppressed Optimizer for Offline RL

cs.LG · 2026-05-03 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0

AdamO modifies Adam with an orthogonality correction to ensure the spectral radius of the TD update operator stays below one, providing a theoretical stability guarantee for offline RL.

Behavior Regularized Offline Reinforcement Learning

cs.LG · 2019-11-26 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0

Behavior-regularized actor-critic methods achieve strong offline RL results with simple regularization, rendering many recent technical additions unnecessary.

Deep Double Q-learning

cs.LG · 2025-06-30 · unverdicted · novelty 5.0

Deep Double Q-learning explicitly trains two Q-functions in deep RL, outperforming Double DQN on 47 of 57 Atari games while further reducing overestimation.

Plasticity Loss in Deep Reinforcement Learning: A Survey

cs.AI · 2024-11-07 · unverdicted · novelty 4.0

Survey unifies the definition of plasticity loss in DRL, taxonomizes over 50 mitigations, identifies evaluation gaps, and finds general regularization often outperforms domain-specific methods.

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Showing 14 of 14 citing papers.