Deep Q-Learning: Theoretical Insights From an Asymptotic Analysis

Deep Q-learning is an important reinforcement learning algorithm, which involves training a deep neural network, called deep Q-network, to approximate the well-known Q-function. Although wildly successful under laboratory conditions, serious gaps between theory and practice as well as a lack of formal guarantees prevent its use in the real world. Adopting a dynamical systems perspective, we provide a theoretical analysis of a popular version of deep Q-learning under realistic and verifiable assumptions. More specifically, we prove an important result on the convergence of the algorithm, characterizing the asymptotic behavior of the learning process. Our result sheds light on hitherto unexplained properties of the algorithm and helps understand empirical observations, such as performance inconsistencies even after training. Unlike previous theories, our analysis accommodates state Markov processes with multiple stationary distributions. In spite of the focus on deep Q-learning, we believe that our theory may be applied to understand other deep learning algorithms.