{"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/error-controlled-actor-critic","title":"Error Controlled Actor-Critic","arxiv_id":"2109.02517","date":"2021-09-06","proceeding":null,"authors":["Xingen Gao","Fei Chao","Changle Zhou","Zhen Ge","Chih-Min Lin","Longzhi Yang","Xiang Chang","Changjing Shang"],"abstract":"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.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.02517v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2109.02517v2.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":"error-controlled-actor-critic","repo_url":"https://github.com/SingerGao/ECAC","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"continuous-control","task_name":"Continuous Control"},{"task_slug":"continuous-control","task_name":"continuous-control"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}