{"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/online-meta-critic-learning-for-off-policy-1","title":"Online Meta-Critic Learning for Off-Policy Actor-Critic Methods","arxiv_id":"2003.05334","date":"2020-03-11","proceeding":"NeurIPS 2020 12","authors":["Wei Zhou","Yiying Li","Yongxin Yang","Huaimin Wang","Timothy M. Hospedales"],"abstract":"Off-Policy Actor-Critic (Off-PAC) methods have proven successful in a variety of continuous control tasks. Normally, the critic's action-value function is updated using temporal-difference, and the critic in turn provides a loss for the actor that trains it to take actions with higher expected return. In this paper, we introduce a novel and flexible meta-critic that observes the learning process and meta-learns an additional loss for the actor that accelerates and improves actor-critic learning. Compared to the vanilla critic, the meta-critic network is explicitly trained to accelerate the learning process; and compared to existing meta-learning algorithms, meta-critic is rapidly learned online for a single task, rather than slowly over a family of tasks. Crucially, our meta-critic framework is designed for off-policy based learners, which currently provide state-of-the-art reinforcement learning sample efficiency. We demonstrate that online meta-critic learning leads to improvements in avariety of continuous control environments when combined with contemporary Off-PAC methods DDPG, TD3 and the state-of-the-art SAC.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.05334v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2003.05334v2.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":"online-meta-critic-learning-for-off-policy-1","repo_url":"https://github.com/zwfightzw/Meta-Critic","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"continuous-control","task_name":"Continuous Control"},{"task_slug":"meta-learning","task_name":"Meta-Learning"},{"task_slug":"reinforcement-learning","task_name":"Reinforcement Learning"},{"task_slug":"continuous-control","task_name":"continuous-control"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"adam","method_name":"Adam"},{"method_slug":"batch-normalization","method_name":"Batch Normalization"},{"method_slug":"clipped-double-q-learning","method_name":"Clipped Double Q-learning"},{"method_slug":"convolution","method_name":"Convolution"},{"method_slug":"ddpg","method_name":"DDPG"},{"method_slug":"dense-connections","method_name":"Dense Connections"},{"method_slug":"experience-replay","method_name":"Experience Replay"},{"method_slug":"relu","method_name":"ReLU"},{"method_slug":"td3","method_name":"TD3"},{"method_slug":"target-policy-smoothing","method_name":"Target Policy Smoothing"},{"method_slug":"weight-decay","method_name":"Weight Decay"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":"https://syntology.ai/paper/2003.05334","atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2003.05334","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2003.05334"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-25T09:33:49+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"deterministic:regex_extraction","url":"https://github.com/zwfightzw/Meta-Critic","reach":null}],"summary":{"ran":6},"by_repo_kind":{"official":{"samples":6,"ran":6,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":6,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"d263091df5df7826","entry":"Actor","repo":"zwfightzw/Meta-Critic","repo_kind":"official","path":"TD3_DDPG_MC/DDPG_MC.py","file_url":"https://github.com/zwfightzw/Meta-Critic/blob/HEAD/TD3_DDPG_MC/DDPG_MC.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran","verification_level":1,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":"deterministic","behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"NONE","inline_ok":false,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"d263091df5df7826"}},{"code_sha256_prefix":"114ba608c4125ae9","entry":"Actor_Feature","repo":"zwfightzw/Meta-Critic","repo_kind":"official","path":"TD3_DDPG_MC/DDPG_MC.py","file_url":"https://github.com/zwfightzw/Meta-Critic/blob/HEAD/TD3_DDPG_MC/DDPG_MC.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran","verification_level":1,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":"deterministic","behaviour_fingerprint":true,"licence":"NONE","inline_ok":false,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"114ba608c4125ae9"}},{"code_sha256_prefix":"dec65f597098b86c","entry":"Critic","repo":"zwfightzw/Meta-Critic","repo_kind":"official","path":"TD3_DDPG_MC/DDPG_MC.py","file_url":"https://github.com/zwfightzw/Meta-Critic/blob/HEAD/TD3_DDPG_MC/DDPG_MC.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran","verification_level":1,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":"deterministic","behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"NONE","inline_ok":false,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"dec65f597098b86c"}},{"code_sha256_prefix":"23fdb860b3a0ff26","entry":"Critic_Network","repo":"zwfightzw/Meta-Critic","repo_kind":"official","path":"TD3_DDPG_MC/DDPG_MC.py","file_url":"https://github.com/zwfightzw/Meta-Critic/blob/HEAD/TD3_DDPG_MC/DDPG_MC.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran","verification_level":1,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":"deterministic","behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"NONE","inline_ok":false,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"23fdb860b3a0ff26"}},{"code_sha256_prefix":"b60e2ef0247a9b83","entry":"DDPG_MC","repo":"zwfightzw/Meta-Critic","repo_kind":"official","path":"TD3_DDPG_MC/DDPG_MC.py","file_url":"https://github.com/zwfightzw/Meta-Critic/blob/HEAD/TD3_DDPG_MC/DDPG_MC.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran","verification_level":1,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"NONE","inline_ok":false,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"b60e2ef0247a9b83"}},{"code_sha256_prefix":"d11950901c3250e9","entry":"Hot_Plug","repo":"zwfightzw/Meta-Critic","repo_kind":"official","path":"TD3_DDPG_MC/DDPG_MC.py","file_url":"https://github.com/zwfightzw/Meta-Critic/blob/HEAD/TD3_DDPG_MC/DDPG_MC.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran","verification_level":1,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"NONE","inline_ok":false,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"d11950901c3250e9"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}