Comment by elchananHaas

I think the article's analysis of overapproximation bias is correct. The issue is that due to the Max operator in the Q learning noise is amplified over timesteps. Some methods to reduce this bias, such as https://arxiv.org/abs/1509.06461 were successful in improving the RL agents performance. Studies have found that this happens even more for the states that the network hasn't visited many times.

An exponential number of states only matters if there is no pattern to them. If there is some structure that the network can learn then it can perform well. This is a strength of deep learning, not a weakness. The trick is getting the right training objective, which the article claims q learning isn't.

I do wonder if MuZero and other model based RL systems are the solution to the author's concerns. MuZero can reanalyze prior trajectories to improve training efficiency. The Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) is a principled way to perform horizon reduction by unrolling the model multiple steps. The max operator in MCTS could cause similar issues but the search progressing deeper counteracts this.