{"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/grac-self-guided-and-self-regularized-actor","title":"GRAC: Self-Guided and Self-Regularized Actor-Critic","arxiv_id":"2009.08973","date":"2020-09-18","proceeding":null,"authors":["Lin Shao","Yifan You","Mengyuan Yan","Qingyun Sun","Jeannette Bohg"],"abstract":"Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithms have successfully been demonstrated on a range of challenging decision making and control tasks. One dominant component of recent deep reinforcement learning algorithms is the target network which mitigates the divergence when learning the Q function. However, target networks can slow down the learning process due to delayed function updates. Our main contribution in this work is a self-regularized TD-learning method to address divergence without requiring a target network. Additionally, we propose a self-guided policy improvement method by combining policy-gradient with zero-order optimization to search for actions associated with higher Q-values in a broad neighborhood. This makes learning more robust to local noise in the Q function approximation and guides the updates of our actor network. Taken together, these components define GRAC, a novel self-guided and self-regularized actor critic algorithm. We evaluate GRAC on the suite of OpenAI gym tasks, achieving or outperforming state of the art in every environment tested.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.08973v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2009.08973v2.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":"grac-self-guided-and-self-regularized-actor","repo_url":"https://github.com/jakegrigsby/deep_control/blob/master/deep_control/grac.py","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"decision-making","task_name":"Decision Making"},{"task_slug":"deep-reinforcement-learning","task_name":"Deep Reinforcement Learning"},{"task_slug":"openai-gym","task_name":"OpenAI Gym"},{"task_slug":"reinforcement-learning","task_name":"Reinforcement Learning"},{"task_slug":"reinforcement-learning-1","task_name":"Reinforcement Learning (RL)"},{"task_slug":"reinforcement-learning-2","task_name":"reinforcement-learning"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2009.08973","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}