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Title: Boosting the Actor with Dual Critic

Paper content:
This paper proposes a new actor-critic-style algorithm called Dual Actor-Critic or Dual-AC.
It is derived in a principled way from the Lagrangian dual form of the Bellman optimality equation, which can be viewed as a two-player game between the actor and a critic-like function, which is named as dual critic.
Compared to its actor-critic relatives, Dual-AC has the desired property that the actor and dual critic are updated cooperatively to optimize the same objective function, providing a more transparent way for learning the critic that is directly related to the objective function of the actor.
We then provide a concrete algorithm that can effectively solve the minimax optimization problem, using techniques of multi-step bootstrapping, path regularization, and stochastic dual ascent algorithm.
We demonstrate that the proposed algorithm achieves the state-of-the-art performances across several benchmarks.
Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms aim to learn a policy that maximizes the long-term return by sequentially interacting with an unknown environment.
Value-function-based algorithms first approximate the optimal value function, which can then be used to derive a good policy.
These methods BID23 BID28 often take advantage of the Bellman equation and use bootstrapping to make learning more sample efficient than Monte Carlo estimation BID25 .
However, the relation between the quality of the learned value function and the quality of the derived policy is fairly weak BID6 .
Policy-search-based algorithms such as REINFORCE BID29 and others (Kakade, 2002; BID18 , on the other hand, assume a fixed space of parameterized policies and search for the optimal policy parameter based on unbiased Monte Carlo estimates.
The parameters are often updated incrementally along stochastic directions that on average are guaranteed to increase the policy quality.
Unfortunately, they often have a greater variance that results in a higher sample complexity.Actor-critic methods combine the benefits of these two classes, and have proved successful in a number of challenging problems such as robotics (Deisenroth et al., 2013) , meta-learning BID3 , and games (Mnih et al., 2016 ).
An actor-critic algorithm has two components: the actor (policy) and the critic (value function).
As in policy-search methods, actor is updated towards the direction of policy improvement.
However, the update directions are computed with the help of the critic, which can be more efficiently learned as in value-function-based methods BID24 Konda & Tsitsiklis, 2003; BID13 BID7 BID19 .
Although the use of a critic may introduce bias in learning the actor, its reduces variance and thus the sample complexity as well, compared to pure policy-search algorithms.While the use of a critic is important for the efficiency of actor-critic algorithms, it is not entirely clear how the critic should be optimized to facilitate improvement of the actor.
For some parametric family of policies, it is known that a certain compatibility condition ensures the actor parameter update is an unbiased estimate of the true policy gradient BID24 .
In practice, temporaldifference methods are perhaps the most popular choice to learn the critic, especially when nonlinear function approximation is used (e.g., BID19 ).In
this paper, we propose a new actor-critic-style algorithm where the actor and the critic-like function, which we named as dual critic, are trained cooperatively to optimize the same objective function. The
algorithm, called Dual Actor-Critic , is derived in a principled way by solving a dual form of the Bellman equation BID6 . The
algorithm can be viewed as a two-player game between the actor and the dual critic, and in principle can be solved by standard optimization algorithms like stochastic gradient descent (Section 2). We
emphasize the dual critic is not fitting the value function for current policy, but that of the optimal policy. We
then show that, when function approximation is used, direct application of standard optimization techniques can result in instability in training, because of the lack of convex-concavity in the objective function (Section 3). Inspired
by the augmented Lagrangian method (Luenberger & Ye, 2015; Boyd et al., 2010) , we propose path regularization for enhanced numerical stability. We also
generalize the two-player game formulation to the multi-step case to yield a better bias/variance tradeoff. The full
algorithm is derived and described in Section 4, and is compared to existing algorithms in Section 5. Finally,
our algorithm is evaluated on several locomotion tasks in the MuJoCo benchmark BID27 , and compares favorably to state-of-the-art algorithms across the board.Notation. We denote
a discounted MDP by M = (S, A, P, R, γ), where S is the state space, A the action space, P (·|s, a) the transition probability kernel defining the distribution over next-state upon taking action a in state x, R(s, a) the corresponding immediate rewards, and γ ∈ (0, 1) the discount factor. If there
is no ambiguity, we will use a f (a) and f (a)da interchangeably.
In this paper, we revisited the linear program formulation of the Bellman optimality equation, whose Lagrangian dual form yields a game-theoretic view for the roles of the actor and the dual critic.
Although such a framework for actor and dual critic allows them to be optimized for the same objective function, parametering the actor and dual critic unfortunately induces instablity in optimization.
We analyze the sources of instability, which is corroborated by numerical experiments.
We then propose Dual Actor-Critic , which exploits stochastic dual ascent algorithm for the path regularized, DISPLAYFORM0 Figure 2: The results of Dual-AC against TRPO and PPO baselines.
Each plot shows average reward during training across 5 random seeded runs, with 50% confidence interval.
The x-axis is the number of training iterations.
The Dual-AC achieves comparable performances comparing with TRPO and PPO in some tasks, but outperforms on more challenging tasks.multi-step bootstrapping two-player game, to bypass these issues.
Proof We rewrite the linear programming 3 as DISPLAYFORM1 Recall the T is monotonic, i.e., if DISPLAYFORM2 Theorem 1 (Optimal policy from occupancy) s,a∈S×A ρ * (s, a) = 1, and π DISPLAYFORM3 a∈A ρ * (s,a) .
Proof For the optimal occupancy measure, it must satisfy DISPLAYFORM4 where P denotes the transition distribution and I denotes a |S| × |SA| matrix where I ij = 1 if and only if j ∈ [(i − 1) |A| + 1, . . . , i |A|].
Multiply both sides with 1, due to µ and P are probabilities, we have 1, ρ * = 1.Without loss of generality, we assume there is only one best action in each state.
Therefore, by the KKT complementary conditions of (3), i.e., ρ(s, a) R(s, a) + γE s |s,a [V (s )] − V (s) = 0, which implies ρ * (s, a) = 0 if and only if a = a * , therefore, the π * by normalization.Theorem 2 The optimal policy π * and its corresponding value function V * is the solution to the following saddle problem DISPLAYFORM5 Proof Due to the strong duality of the optimization (3), we have DISPLAYFORM6 Then, plugging the property of the optimum in Theorem 1, we achieve the final optimization (6).

assistant: text: We propose Dual Actor-Critic algorithm, which is derived in a principled way from the Lagrangian dual form of the Bellman optimality equation. The algorithm achieves the state-of-the-art performances across several benchmarks.