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Soft Actor Critic

58 papers tagged archive 2025-07-28

Introduced by Tuomas Haarnoja et al. in Soft Actor-Critic: Off-Policy Maximum Entropy Deep Reinforcement Learning with a Stochastic Actor

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

Soft Actor Critic, or SAC, is an off-policy actor-critic deep RL algorithm based on the maximum entropy reinforcement learning framework. In this framework, the actor aims to maximize expected reward while also maximizing entropy. That is, to succeed at the task while acting as randomly as possible. Prior deep RL methods based on this framework have been formulated as Q-learning methods. SAC combines off-policy updates with a stable stochastic actor-critic formulation.

The SAC objective has a number of advantages. First, the policy is incentivized to explore more widely, while giving up on clearly unpromising avenues. Second, the policy can capture multiple modes of near-optimal behavior. In problem settings where multiple actions seem equally attractive, the policy will commit equal probability mass to those actions. Lastly, the authors present evidence that it improves learning speed over state-of-art methods that optimize the conventional RL objective function.

PaperSource

Papers archive 2025-07-28

30 shown of 58, 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 55 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)32
Reinforcement Learning28
reinforcement-learning25
Deep Reinforcement Learning22
Continuous Control14
continuous-control12
Decision Making6
Imitation Learning5
OpenAI Gym5
Efficient Exploration4
Q-Learning4
Motion Planning3
Autonomous Driving2
Autonomous Racing2
Data Augmentation2
Management2
Model-based Reinforcement Learning2
MuJoCo2
Astronomy1
Atari Games1

Usage over time archive 2025-07-28

Papers per year tagged with Soft Actor Critic: 2018 to 2025, peak 11 11 0 2018: 2 papers 2018 2019: 8 papers 2019 2020: 11 papers 2020 2021: 8 papers 2021 2022: 6 papers 2022 2023: 7 papers 2023 2024: 10 papers 2024 2025: 6 papers 2025
Papers per year the archive tags with this method, by the paper's archive date (58 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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