Papers › Error Controlled Actor-Critic

Error Controlled Actor-Critic

6 Sep 2021arXiv:2109.02517archive 2025-07-28

Xingen Gao, Fei Chao, Changle Zhou, Zhen Ge, Chih-Min Lin, Longzhi Yang, Xiang Chang, Changjing Shang

On error of value function inevitably causes an overestimation phenomenon and has a negative impact on the convergence of the algorithms. To mitigate the negative effects of the approximation error, we propose Error Controlled Actor-critic which ensures confining the approximation error in value function. We present an analysis of how the approximation error can hinder the optimization process of actor-critic methods.Then, we derive an upper boundary of the approximation error of Q function approximator and find that the error can be lowered by restricting on the KL-divergence between every two consecutive policies when training the policy. The results of experiments on a range of continuous control tasks demonstrate that the proposed actor-critic algorithm apparently reduces the approximation error and significantly outperforms other model-free RL algorithms.

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