aiqbench analysis
This research proposes RDA2C, a novel actor-critic algorithm that fundamentally reinterprets replay buffers by integrating historical advantage estimates directly into the policy objective via regularized dual averaging. Theoretical analysis demonstrates how this approach bounds errors from stale data and critic bias, resulting in empirical performance that surpasses standard baselines like PPO on MuJoCo and Atari environments. By optimizing over an aggregated dataset rather than just recent updates, the method significantly improves sample efficiency for reinforcement learning tasks.
Policy as Data: Replay-Based Policy Dual Averaging via Advantage Regression
arXiv:2610.04638v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Actor-critic methods reuse past experience to improve sample efficiency. However, historical data are typically regarded as off-policy samples for the current policy-improvement update. This work introduces Regularized Dual Averaging Actor Critic (RDA2C), which assigns a distinct role to replay. In regularized dual averaging, the subsequent policy is determined by accumulated policy-improvement feedback, so historical advantage estimates contribute directly to the actor objective rather than solely to the most recent update. RDA2C stores state-action samples with critic-estimated advantage labels, fits a dual score model $Z_\theta$ to the aggregated dataset, and derives the current policy from the accumulated score model using the entropy mirror map. In this way, replay defines an empirical dual objective from which the policy is computed. To analyze RDA2C, we establish a finite-time value-gap decomposition, separating the regularized dual-averaging term from errors due to stale-replay supervised fitting, critic bias, finite-buffer variance, and replay coverage, and stating the assumptions under which each error is bounded. RDA2C accepts advantage labels from any critic. With GAE labels, RDA2C outperforms PPO on six of eight MuJoCo tasks and eight of twelve Atari games. RDA2C also outperforms AAPDA, the closest dual-averaging baseline, on six of eight MuJoCo tasks. With twin-$Q$ labels, RDA2C matches SAC at matched batch size and update frequency.
Abstract:Actor-critic methods reuse past experience to improve sample efficiency. However, historical data are typically regarded as off-policy samples for the current policy-improvement update. This work introduces Regularized Dual Averaging Actor Critic (RDA2C), which assigns a distinct role to replay. In regularized dual averaging, the subsequent policy is determined by accumulated policy-improvement feedback, so historical advantage estimates contribute directly to the actor objective rather than solely to the most recent update. RDA2C stores state-action samples with critic-estimated advantage labels, fits a dual score model $Z_\theta$ to the aggregated dataset, and derives the current policy from the accumulated score model using the entropy mirror map. In this way, replay defines an empirical dual objective from which the policy is computed. To analyze RDA2C, we establish a finite-time value-gap decomposition, separating the regularized dual-averaging term from errors due to stale-replay supervised fitting, critic bias, finite-buffer variance, and replay coverage, and stating the assumptions under which each error is bounded. RDA2C accepts advantage labels from any critic. With GAE labels, RDA2C outperforms PPO on six of eight MuJoCo tasks and eight of twelve Atari games. RDA2C also outperforms AAPDA, the closest dual-averaging baseline, on six of eight MuJoCo tasks. With twin-$Q$ labels, RDA2C matches SAC at matched batch size and update frequency.
Machine Learning (cs.LG); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Optimization and Control (math.OC)
arXiv:2610.04638 [cs.LG]
(or arXiv:2610.04638v1 [cs.LG] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.04638 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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