提出新框架缓解连续控制中强化学习的高估偏差问题。
Collaborative Weighting with Pessimistic Critic for Mitigating Overestimation in Off-Policy Reinforcement Learning

- 用分布式评判者建模回报不确定性,协同重加权时序差分误差与不确定度。
- 在多个仿真任务上显著提升SAC、TD3等算法性能,稳定训练过程。
- 适合研究离线强化学习或需稳健价值估计的连续控制场景。
连续控制中的深度离线强化学习算法通常依赖神经网络价值函数近似来指导策略优化。然而,时序差分(TD)学习引入噪声目标,导致非平稳优化;贪婪策略更新会放大早期估计误差,递归传播引发持续高估偏差并降低训练稳定性。现有方法通过优先采样或修改价值学习目标缓解此问题,但常过度关注高不确定性转移,因数据覆盖不足或自举误差而进一步加剧偏差。本文提出协同加权演员-评论家(CWAC)框架,显式建模价值估计中的预测不确定性。CWAC采用分布式评论者建模回报不确定性,并引入协同加权机制,联合重加权TD误差与不确定性,从而在可靠样本上实现鲁棒学习,同时抑制噪声更新。此外,通过从回报分布中采样实现随机悲观价值估计,有效缓解策略优化中的误差传播。CWAC可无缝集成至SAC、TD3、DDPG等现有离线算法框架,仅增加少量计算开销。实验表明,该方法在多样化仿真任务中显著提升性能。代码已公开于https://anonymous.4open.science/r/CWAC-348E。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Deep off-policy reinforcement learning algorithms for continuous control typically rely on neural value function approximation to guide policy improvement. However, temporal-difference (TD) learning introduces noisy targets, resulting in non-stationary optimization, while greedy policy updates amplify early-stage estimation errors. The recursive propagation of such errors leads to persistent overestimation bias and degraded training stability in actor-critic methods. Existing approaches attempt to alleviate this issue via prioritized sampling or modified value learning objectives, but often overemphasize high-uncertainty transitions caused by limited data coverage or bootstrapping errors, thereby further amplifying bias.In this paper, we propose Collaborative Weighting Actor-Critic (CWAC), a unified framework that explicitly accounts for predictive uncertainty in value estimation. CWAC employs distributional critic to model return uncertainty and introduces a collaborative weighting mechanism that jointly reweights TD-errors and uncertainty, enabling robust learning from reliable samples while suppressing noisy updates. In addition, we incorporate a stochastic pessimistic value estimation scheme via sampling from the return distribution, which effectively mitigates error propagation during policy improvement. CWAC can be seamlessly integrated into existing off-policy algorithm frameworks such as SAC, TD3, and DDPG with minimal overhead. Empirical results demonstrate that our proposed method significantly enhances performance across a diverse range of simulated tasks. Our code is publicly available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/CWAC-348E.
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