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Title: Dynamically Balanced Value Estimates for Actor-Critic Methods

Paper content:
Reinforcement learning in an actor-critic setting relies on accurate value estimates of the critic.
However, the combination of function approximation, temporal difference (TD) learning and off-policy training can lead to an overestimating value function.
A solution is to use Clipped Double Q-learning (CDQ), which is used in the TD3 algorithm and computes the minimum of two critics in the TD-target.
We show that CDQ induces an underestimation bias and propose a new algorithm that accounts for this by using a weighted average of the target from CDQ and the target coming from a single critic.
The weighting parameter is adjusted during training such that the value estimates match the actual discounted return on the most recent episodes and by that it balances over- and underestimation.
Empirically, we obtain more accurate value estimates and demonstrate state of the art results on several OpenAI gym tasks.
In recent years it was shown that reinforcement learning algorithms are capable of solving very complex tasks, surpassing human expert performance in games like Go , Starcraft (DeepMind) or Dota (OpenAI).
However, usually a large amount of training time is needed to achieve these results (e.g. 45,000 years of gameplay for Dota).
For many important problems (e.g. in robotics) it is prohibitively expensive for the reinforcement learning agent to interact with its environment that much.
This makes it difficult to apply such algorithms in the real world.
Off-policy reinforcement learning holds the promise of being more data-efficient than on-policy methods as old experience can be reused several times for training.
Unfortunately, the combination of temporal-difference (TD) learning, function approximation and off-policy training can be unstable, which is why it has been called the deadly triad (Sutton & Barto, 2018; van Hasselt et al., 2018) .
If the action space is discrete, solutions like Double DQN (Van Hasselt et al., 2016) are very effective at preventing divergence of the value estimates by eliminating an otherwise prevailing overestimation bias.
For continuous action spaces, which characterize many tasks, it was shown that Double DQN can not solve the overestimation problem Fujimoto et al. (2018) .
In an actor-critic setting it is important that the value estimates of the critic are accurate in order for the actor to learn a policy from the critic.
The TD3 Fujimoto et al. (2018) algorithm uses Clipped Double Q-learning (CDQ) to produce a critic without an overestimation bias, which greatly improved the performance of the algorithm.
In CDQ two critics are trained at the same time and the TD target for both of them is the minimum over the two single TD targets.
While the authors note that the CDQ critic update tends to underestimate the true values, this is not further examined.
We show that this underestimation bias occurs in practice and propose a method that accounts for over-and underestimation of the critic at the same time.
Similarly to CDQ we train two function approximators for the Q-values, but we regress them not on the same quantity.
The TD target for each of the two critics is a weighted average of the single TD target for that critic and the TD target from CDQ.
The weighting parameter is learned by comparing the value estimates for the most recent state-action pairs with the observed discounted returns for these pairs.
As the one term of the average has an underestimation bias while the other one has an overestimation bias, the weighted average balances these biases and we show empirically that this method obtains much more accurate estimates of the Q-values.
We verify that the more accurate critics improve the performance of the reinforcement learning agent as our method achieves state of the art results on a range of continuous control tasks from OpenAi gym Brockman et al. (2016) .
To guarantee reproducibility we open source our code which is easy to execute and evaluate our algorithm on a large number of different random seeds.
We showed that Clipped Double Q-learning (CDQ) induces an underestimation bias in the critic, while an overestimation bias occurs if just one Q-network is used.
From that we derived the Balanced Clipped Double Q-learning algorithm (BCDQ) that updates the critic through a weighted average of the two mentioned update mechanisms.
The weighting parameter is adjusted over the course of training by comparing the Q-values of recently visited state-action pairs with the actual discounted return observed from that pair onwards.
It was shown that BCDQ achieves much more accurate value estimates by adjusting the weighting parameter.
Replacing CDQ with BCDQ leads to the Balanced Twin Delayed Deep Deterministic policy gradient algorithm (BTD3).
Our method achieves state of the art performance on a range of continuous control tasks.
Furthermore, BCDQ can be added to any other actor-critic algorithm while it only minimally increases the computational complexity compared to CDQ.
It is also be possible to use BCDQ for discrete action spaces.
Evaluating that approach is an interesting area for future research.

assistant: text: A method for more accurate critic estimates in reinforcement learning.