I finally got around to reading Playing Atari with Deep Reinforcement Learning, a well cited paper from a few years back where DeepMind trained a neural network to play several Atari games.

Digging into RL and OpenAI’s gym, I kept on seeing references to it and it seemed like only a matter of time until I would have to make my way back to it. The paper did not disappoint, as even in the “Background” section, some details that previously were a bit fuzzy became clear.

I was familiar with stochastic gradient descent, backpropagation, and the basic idea of how loss is calculated in supervised learning, but it’s taken a little while to digest how this works in reinforcement learning, particularly in optimizing a deep Q network.

In the words of the paper:

A Q-network can be trained by minimising a sequence of loss functions Lii) that changes at each iteration i, where yi = Es′~E [r + γ maxa′ Q(s′, a′; θi−1)|s, a] is the target for iteration i and ρ(s, a) is a probability distribution over sequences s and actions a that we refer to as the behaviour distribution.

In supervised learning, it is usually very clear what y is, as it is simply the labeled data. But in a RL, this becomes less clear. y-hat also seems intuitive to me as it is simply the Q-value output from the Q-network. But y, uses the Q-network itself in addition to the immediate reward from the environment to calculated the expected cumulative reward.