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What is: Deep Q-Network?

SourcePlaying Atari with Deep Reinforcement Learning
Year2000
Data SourceCC BY-SA - https://paperswithcode.com

A DQN, or Deep Q-Network, approximates a state-value function in a Q-Learning framework with a neural network. In the Atari Games case, they take in several frames of the game as an input and output state values for each action as an output.

It is usually used in conjunction with Experience Replay, for storing the episode steps in memory for off-policy learning, where samples are drawn from the replay memory at random. Additionally, the Q-Network is usually optimized towards a frozen target network that is periodically updated with the latest weights every kk steps (where kk is a hyperparameter). The latter makes training more stable by preventing short-term oscillations from a moving target. The former tackles autocorrelation that would occur from on-line learning, and having a replay memory makes the problem more like a supervised learning problem.

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