Understanding What Affects Generalization Gap in Visual Reinforcement
  Learning: Theory and Empirical Evidence
Jiafei Lyu Le Wan Xiu Li Zongqing Lu
Recently, there are many efforts attempting to learn useful policies for
continuous control in visual reinforcement learning (RL). In this scenario, it
is important to learn a generalizable policy, as the testing environment may
differ from the training environment, e.g., there exist distractors during
deployment. Many practical algorithms are proposed to handle this problem.
However, to the best of our knowledge, none of them provide a theoretical
understanding of what affects the generalization gap and why their proposed
methods work. In this paper, we bridge this issue by theoretically answering
the key factors that contribute to the generalization gap when the testing
environment has distractors. Our theories indicate that minimizing the
representation distance between training and testing environments, which aligns
with human intuition, is the most critical for the benefit of reducing the
generalization gap. Our theoretical results are supported by the empirical
evidence in the DMControl Generalization Benchmark (DMC-GB).