{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/actor-critic-or-critic-actor-a-tale-of-two","title":"Actor-Critic or Critic-Actor? A Tale of Two Time Scales","arxiv_id":"2210.04470","date":"2022-10-10","proceeding":null,"authors":["Shalabh Bhatnagar","Vivek S. Borkar","Soumyajit Guin"],"abstract":"We revisit the standard formulation of tabular actor-critic algorithm as a two time-scale stochastic approximation with value function computed on a faster time-scale and policy computed on a slower time-scale. This emulates policy iteration. We observe that reversal of the time scales will in fact emulate value iteration and is a legitimate algorithm. We provide a proof of convergence and compare the two empirically with and without function approximation (with both linear and nonlinear function approximators) and observe that our proposed critic-actor algorithm performs on par with actor-critic in terms of both accuracy and computational effort.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.04470v5","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2210.04470v5.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"actor-critic-or-critic-actor-a-tale-of-two","repo_url":"https://github.com/gsoumyajit/actor-critic-critic-actor","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"two","task_name":"Vocal Bursts Valence Prediction"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}