Methods › Reinforcement Learning › Policy Gradient Methods › A2C

A2C

82 papers tagged archive 2025-07-28

Introduced by Volodymyr Mnih et al. in Asynchronous Methods for Deep Reinforcement Learning

archive 2025-07-28 Description, source and code snippet are the archive's method entry.

A2C, or Advantage Actor Critic, is a synchronous version of the A3C policy gradient method. As an alternative to the asynchronous implementation of A3C, A2C is a synchronous, deterministic implementation that waits for each actor to finish its segment of experience before updating, averaging over all of the actors. This more effectively uses GPUs due to larger batch sizes.

Image Credit: OpenAI Baselines

PaperSource

Papers archive 2025-07-28

30 shown of 82, newest first. Repository counts are the archive's code-links table. A Syntology line states what Syntology ran from that paper's harvested code; it is per sample and not a correctness claim.

Tasks archive 2025-07-28

20 shown of 86 tasks the archive attaches to papers tagged with this method, by distinct papers. A task without a page in the catalog is plain text.

TaskPapers
Reinforcement Learning (RL)52
reinforcement-learning50
Reinforcement Learning49
Deep Reinforcement Learning30
Decision Making12
Atari Games10
Q-Learning7
Continuous Control6
continuous-control6
OpenAI Gym5
Benchmarking4
Management4
Representation Learning4
GPU3
MuJoCo3
Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning3
Computational Efficiency2
Drug Discovery2
Language Modelling2
Myocardial infarction detection2

Usage over time archive 2025-07-28

Papers per year tagged with A2C: 2016 to 2025, peak 14 14 0 2016: 1 paper 2016 2017: 4 papers 2017 2018: 8 papers 2018 2019: 14 papers 2019 2020: 10 papers 2020 2021: 8 papers 2021 2022: 10 papers 2022 2023: 14 papers 2023 2024: 9 papers 2024 2025: 4 papers 2025
Papers per year the archive tags with this method, by the paper's archive date (82 dated). Bars are counts, not a trend claim.

Components: the archive holds no method-to-method composition, so PwC's Components table cannot be rebuilt; the Papers list carries no Results column for the same reason (the archive does not join its leaderboard rows to method tags).

Categories archive 2025-07-28

Policy Gradient Methods

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