About Modulating Epsilon

def epsilon(ε):

noun1:
“the fifth letter of the Greek alphabet ( Ε, ε ), transliterated as ‘e.’”

symbol2:
“permittivity - the ability of a substance to store electrical energy in an electric field.”

symbol3:
“in machine learning, within the subfield of reinforcement learning, a small probability parameter (typically 0 < ε < 1) that determines the balance of exploration versus exploitation; specifically, the probability of selecting a random action rather than the greedy action with the highest estimated value.”

  1. “Epsilon, N.” Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford UP, July 2023, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/5727044399. ↩

  2. “Permittivity, N.” Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford UP, July 2023, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/1098496860. ↩

  3. Sutton, R. S., & Barto, A. G. (2018). Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction (2nd ed.). MIT Press. (See Section 2.2, “Action-value Methods”). In the second edition of Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction (2018), Sutton and Barto provide the following concise definition in Section 2.2:

    “A simple alternative is to behave greedily most of the time, but every once in a while, say with small probability $\epsilon$, instead select randomly from among all the actions with equal probability, independently of the action-value estimates.”

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