{"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/bootstrapping-the-expressivity-with-model","title":"On the Expressivity of Neural Networks for Deep Reinforcement Learning","arxiv_id":"1910.05927","date":"2019-10-14","proceeding":"ICML 2020 1","authors":["Kefan Dong","Yuping Luo","Tengyu Ma"],"abstract":"We compare the model-free reinforcement learning with the model-based approaches through the lens of the expressive power of neural networks for policies, $Q$-functions, and dynamics. We show, theoretically and empirically, that even for one-dimensional continuous state space, there are many MDPs whose optimal $Q$-functions and policies are much more complex than the dynamics. We hypothesize many real-world MDPs also have a similar property. For these MDPs, model-based planning is a favorable algorithm, because the resulting policies can approximate the optimal policy significantly better than a neural network parameterization can, and model-free or model-based policy optimization rely on policy parameterization. Motivated by the theory, we apply a simple multi-step model-based bootstrapping planner (BOOTS) to bootstrap a weak $Q$-function into a stronger policy. Empirical results show that applying BOOTS on top of model-based or model-free policy optimization algorithms at the test time improves the performance on MuJoCo benchmark tasks.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.05927v3","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/1910.05927v3.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":"bootstrapping-the-expressivity-with-model","repo_url":"https://github.com/roosephu/boots","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"tf","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"deep-reinforcement-learning","task_name":"Deep Reinforcement Learning"},{"task_slug":"mujoco","task_name":"MuJoCo"},{"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":[{"method_slug":"test","method_name":"Test"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=1910.05927","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}