
What I Cannot Control, I Do Not Understand - ericjang
https://blog.evjang.com/2019/03/causal-rl.html
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atomata
Great post A small remark regarding point (2) of the commercial
justifications; it's often conflated that RL "requires" Deep Learning (DL), or
that RL is Deep RL, which is clearly a false assertion - one often made by
groups often seen as "leading" the field - e.g. OpenAI. It should not be
necessary for the future of RL to have such a dependence on DL and perhaps the
assumption of DL is leading a large section of research into a local optima
and somewhat harmful to research and newcomers to the field of RL in general

Appreciate your posts and looking forward to more!

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ericjang
I think that's a fair point, though I think that semantic meaning is often
decided by popular vote. If the masses of undergrads excited about AI have
decided that RL == "Deep RL" == DQN, then that's the practical definition one
should when discussing RL around the water cooler (for instance, "whether RL
works in commercial applications").

I am not really aware of any RL (deep or not) being deployed in commerce
besides bandit problems used in recommender systems and the strong
similarities between shortest-paths / graph planning. Any thoughts?

