{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/190600572","title":"Using a Logarithmic Mapping to Enable Lower Discount Factors in Reinforcement Learning","arxiv_id":"1906.00572","date":"2019-06-03","proceeding":"NeurIPS 2019 12","authors":["Harm van Seijen","Mehdi Fatemi","Arash Tavakoli"],"abstract":"In an effort to better understand the different ways in which the discount factor affects the optimization process in reinforcement learning, we designed a set of experiments to study each effect in isolation. Our analysis reveals that the common perception that poor performance of low discount factors is caused by (too) small action-gaps requires revision. We propose an alternative hypothesis that identifies the size-difference of the action-gap across the state-space as the primary cause. We then introduce a new method that enables more homogeneous action-gaps by mapping value estimates to a logarithmic space. We prove convergence for this method under standard assumptions and demonstrate empirically that it indeed enables lower discount factors for approximate reinforcement-learning methods. This in turn allows tackling a class of reinforcement-learning problems that are challenging to solve with traditional methods.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.00572v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/1906.00572v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"190600572","repo_url":"https://github.com/microsoft/logrl","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"tf","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"NOASSERTION"}},{"paper_slug":"190600572","repo_url":"https://github.com/microsoft/orchestrated-value-mapping","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"tf","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"NOASSERTION"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"general-reinforcement-learning","task_name":"General Reinforcement Learning"},{"task_slug":"reinforcement-learning","task_name":"Reinforcement Learning"},{"task_slug":"reinforcement-learning-1","task_name":"Reinforcement Learning (RL)"},{"task_slug":"reinforcement-learning-2","task_name":"reinforcement-learning"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=1906.00572","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}