{"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/tasac-temporally-abstract-soft-actor-critic","title":"TAAC: Temporally Abstract Actor-Critic for Continuous Control","arxiv_id":"2104.06521","date":"2021-04-13","proceeding":"NeurIPS 2021 12","authors":["Haonan Yu","Wei Xu","Haichao Zhang"],"abstract":"We present temporally abstract actor-critic (TAAC), a simple but effective off-policy RL algorithm that incorporates closed-loop temporal abstraction into the actor-critic framework. TAAC adds a second-stage binary policy to choose between the previous action and a new action output by an actor. Crucially, its \"act-or-repeat\" decision hinges on the actually sampled action instead of the expected behavior of the actor. This post-acting switching scheme let the overall policy make more informed decisions. TAAC has two important features: a) persistent exploration, and b) a new compare-through Q operator for multi-step TD backup, specially tailored to the action repetition scenario. We demonstrate TAAC's advantages over several strong baselines across 14 continuous control tasks. Our surprising finding reveals that while achieving top performance, TAAC is able to \"mine\" a significant number of repeated actions with the trained policy even on continuous tasks whose problem structures on the surface seem to repel action repetition. This suggests that aside from encouraging persistent exploration, action repetition can find its place in a good policy behavior. Code is available at https://github.com/hnyu/taac.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.06521v3","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2104.06521v3.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":"tasac-temporally-abstract-soft-actor-critic","repo_url":"https://github.com/HorizonRobotics/alf","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"tf","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"Apache-2.0"}},{"paper_slug":"tasac-temporally-abstract-soft-actor-critic","repo_url":"https://github.com/hnyu/taac","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"Apache-2.0"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"continuous-control","task_name":"Continuous Control"},{"task_slug":"continuous-control","task_name":"continuous-control"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2104.06521","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2104.06521"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+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/hnyu/taac","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"Apache-2.0"}},{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/HorizonRobotics/alf","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"Apache-2.0"}}],"summary":{"unverified":1},"by_repo_kind":{"official":{"samples":1,"ran":0,"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":0,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"ad6301c525a94f51","entry":"normalize","repo":"HorizonRobotics/alf","repo_kind":"official","path":"alf/algorithms/actor_critic_loss.py","file_url":"https://github.com/HorizonRobotics/alf/blob/HEAD/alf/algorithms/actor_critic_loss.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"unverified","verification_level":0,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"Apache-2.0","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"ad6301c525a94f51"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}