Ablation study has its roots in the field of experimental neuropsychology of the 1960s and 1970s, where parts of animals’ brains were removed to study the effect that this had on their behavior. But in the context of reinforcement learning, especially Q-learning, how anyone can define ablation study?
I am also interested to know that.
One of the reviewers of one of my papers commented us that we did an ablation study to implement our RL approach, but I really don't unsderstand why. From what I have read, it consists on removing some parts of your agents (i.e. one or more NN layers) to evaluate if they still perform well without these parts. But it does not correspond at all to what we did in our paper.
I ended up thinking that the reviewer understood the term "ablation study" to reducing the complexity of the problem by spliting it in different parts.
That is, in our case the problem was to make a UAV to follow a predefined trajectory while avoiding possible obtacles, so we splited the problem in different parts by implemeting an agent to stabilize the inner dynamics of the vehicle (attitude and/or velocities), another RL agent to compute the velocities for following a desired trajectory and a third RL agent that computes the trajectories to avoid all the possible obstacles. Obviously, the problem could be solved by implementinting a unique agent, but we considered that it would dramatically increase the difficulty of the problem, and therefore, the training time.
Summarizing, I do not not if the term "ablation study" refers to removing some parts of your agent, or if it referes to reduce the complexity of your problem by spliting it in different parts.
Have a look at Article Automatic control of cardiac ablation catheter with deep rei...
Also https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/380040/what-is-an-ablation-study-and-is-there-a-systematic-way-to-perform-it and the attachment.
https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/380040/what-is-an-ablation-study-and-is-there-a-systematic-way-to-perform-it
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