A Method for Evaluating Hyperparameter Sensitivity in Reinforcement Learning
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
The performance of modern reinforcement learning algorithms critically relies on tuning ever-increasing numbers of hyperparameters. Often, small changes in a hyperparameter can lead to drastic changes in performance, and different environments require very different hyperparameter settings to achieve state-of-the-art performance reported in the literature. We currently lack a scalable and widely accepted approach to characterizing these complex interactions. This work proposes a new empirical methodology for studying, comparing, and quantifying the sensitivity of an algorithm's performance to hyperparameter tuning for a given set of environments. We then demonstrate the utility of this methodology by assessing the hyperparameter sensitivity of several commonly used normalization variants of PPO. The results suggest that several algorithmic performance improvements may, in fact, be a result of an increased reliance on hyperparameter tuning.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it