Distributional Soft Actor-Critic: Off-Policy Reinforcement Learning for Addressing Value Estimation Errors

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2001.02811v3
• Date: Fri, 11 Jun 2021 15:21:17 GMT
• Title: Distributional Soft Actor-Critic: Off-Policy Reinforcement Learning for Addressing Value Estimation Errors
• Authors: Jingliang Duan, Yang Guan, Shengbo Eben Li, Yangang Ren, Bo Cheng
• Abstract summary: We present a distributional soft actor-critic (DSAC) algorithm to improve the policy performance by mitigating Q-value overestimations. We evaluate DSAC on the suite of MuJoCo continuous control tasks, achieving the state-of-the-art performance.
• Score: 13.534873779043478
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: In reinforcement learning (RL), function approximation errors are known to easily lead to the Q-value overestimations, thus greatly reducing policy performance. This paper presents a distributional soft actor-critic (DSAC) algorithm, which is an off-policy RL method for continuous control setting, to improve the policy performance by mitigating Q-value overestimations. We first discover in theory that learning a distribution function of state-action returns can effectively mitigate Q-value overestimations because it is capable of adaptively adjusting the update stepsize of the Q-value function. Then, a distributional soft policy iteration (DSPI) framework is developed by embedding the return distribution function into maximum entropy RL. Finally, we present a deep off-policy actor-critic variant of DSPI, called DSAC, which directly learns a continuous return distribution by keeping the variance of the state-action returns within a reasonable range to address exploding and vanishing gradient problems. We evaluate DSAC on the suite of MuJoCo continuous control tasks, achieving the state-of-the-art performance.

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