不用显式策略网络,用批评者梯度直接生成动作。
Actor-Critic without Actor
- 用批评者网络的梯度场直接生成动作,省去策略网络
- 在标准基准上学习曲线更优,性能媲美先进方法
- 轻量设计适合大规模函数逼近,保留多模态行为能力
强化学习中的演员-评论家方法虽广泛有效,但依赖独立的演员与评论家网络,易受架构选择和超参数影响,限制了其在需大规模函数逼近场景下的可扩展性。近期基于扩散模型的策略虽能捕捉多模态行为并提升探索,却引入额外设计复杂度与计算开销。本文提出无需演员的演员-评论家(ACA)框架,摒弃显式演员网络,直接从噪声级别评论家的梯度场生成动作。该设计消除了演员训练带来的算法与计算负担,同时保持策略改进与评论家最新价值估计的高度对齐。此外,ACA无需依赖扩散模型即可实现多样化多模态行为表达,兼顾简洁性与表现力。在标准在线强化学习基准上的大量实验表明,ACA在学习曲线和性能上均优于标准演员-评论家及前沿扩散基方法,为在线强化学习提供了一种简单而强大的解决方案。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Actor-critic methods constitute a central paradigm in reinforcement learning (RL), coupling policy evaluation with policy improvement. While effective across many domains, these methods rely on separate actor and critic networks, which makes training vulnerable to architectural decisions and hyperparameter tuning. Such complexity limits their scalability in settings that require large function approximators. Recently, diffusion models have recently been proposed as expressive policies that capture multi-modal behaviors and improve exploration, but they introduce additional design choices and computational burdens, hindering efficient deployment. We introduce Actor-Critic without Actor (ACA), a lightweight framework that eliminates the explicit actor network and instead generates actions directly from the gradient field of a noise-level critic. This design removes the algorithmic and computational overhead of actor training while keeping policy improvement tightly aligned with the critic's latest value estimates. Moreover, ACA retains the ability to capture diverse, multi-modal behaviors without relying on diffusion-based actors, combining simplicity with expressiveness. Through extensive experiments on standard online RL benchmarks,ACA achieves more favorable learning curves and competitive performance compared to both standard actor-critic and state-of-the-art diffusion-based methods, providing a simple yet powerful solution for online RL.
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