AI RESEARCH
When Does Deep RL Beat Calibrated Baselines? A Benchmark Study on Adaptive Resource Control
arXiv CS.AI
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ArXi:2605.26418v1 Announce Type: cross A properly calibrated rule-based autoscaler can beat every one of six mainstream deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithms on cost across every workload we test - so when, if ever, does DRL actually help? We study this in RLScale-Bench, a reproducible benchmark and evaluation protocol for DRL on adaptive resource control, where an agent allocates compute to a dynamic workload under cost and service-level constraints. We evaluate PPO, DQN, A2C, SAC, TD3, and DDPG under matched architectures.