Deep Reinforcement Learning — When Neural Networks Meet RL
Reinforcement learning was a tidy theory stuck on toy problems until it was combined with deep learning. Replacing the value table with a neural network let RL handle the enormous, continuous state spaces of real problems — and the result, deep RL, is what beat humans at Atari, Go, and StarCraft, and what trains agents in the real world today. This post is about that fusion: why it's powerful, why it's notoriously unstable, and the tricks that make it work.
Replacing the value table with a neural network let RL handle huge, continuous, pixel-level state spaces — the leap that beat humans at Atari and Go. Why naive deep RL diverges, the tricks that tame it (experience replay, target networks), and why it's powerful, brittle, and sample-hungry.