Multi-Actor Multi-Critic Deep Deterministic Reinforcement Learning with a Novel Q-Ensemble Method

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Wu, Andy, Lin, Chun-Cheng, Liaw, Rung-Tzuo, Huang, Yuehua, Kuo, Chihjung, Weng, Chia Tong
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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_version_ 1866916983173283840
author Wu, Andy
Lin, Chun-Cheng
Liaw, Rung-Tzuo
Huang, Yuehua
Kuo, Chihjung
Weng, Chia Tong
author_facet Wu, Andy
Lin, Chun-Cheng
Liaw, Rung-Tzuo
Huang, Yuehua
Kuo, Chihjung
Weng, Chia Tong
contents Reinforcement learning has gathered much attention in recent years due to its rapid development and rich applications, especially on control systems and robotics. When tackling real-world applications with reinforcement learning method, the corresponded Markov decision process may have huge discrete or even continuous state/action space. Deep reinforcement learning has been studied for handling these issues through deep learning for years, and one promising branch is the actor-critic architecture. Many past studies leveraged multiple critics to enhance the accuracy of evaluation of a policy for addressing the overestimation and underestimation issues. However, few studies have considered the architecture with multiple actors together with multiple critics. This study proposes a novel multi-actor multi-critic (MAMC) deep deterministic reinforcement learning method. The proposed method has three main features, including selection of actors based on non-dominated sorting for exploration with respect to skill and creativity factors, evaluation for actors and critics using a quantile-based ensemble strategy, and exploiting actors with best skill factor. Theoretical analysis proves the learning stability and bounded estimation bias for the MAMC. The present study examines the performance on a well-known reinforcement learning benchmark MuJoCo. Experimental results show that the proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art deep deterministic based reinforcement learning methods. Experimental analysis also indicates the proposed components are effective. Empirical analysis further investigates the validity of the proposed method, and shows its benefit on complicated problems. The source code can be found at https://github.com/AndyWu101/MAMC.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_01083
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Multi-Actor Multi-Critic Deep Deterministic Reinforcement Learning with a Novel Q-Ensemble Method
Wu, Andy
Lin, Chun-Cheng
Liaw, Rung-Tzuo
Huang, Yuehua
Kuo, Chihjung
Weng, Chia Tong
Machine Learning
Reinforcement learning has gathered much attention in recent years due to its rapid development and rich applications, especially on control systems and robotics. When tackling real-world applications with reinforcement learning method, the corresponded Markov decision process may have huge discrete or even continuous state/action space. Deep reinforcement learning has been studied for handling these issues through deep learning for years, and one promising branch is the actor-critic architecture. Many past studies leveraged multiple critics to enhance the accuracy of evaluation of a policy for addressing the overestimation and underestimation issues. However, few studies have considered the architecture with multiple actors together with multiple critics. This study proposes a novel multi-actor multi-critic (MAMC) deep deterministic reinforcement learning method. The proposed method has three main features, including selection of actors based on non-dominated sorting for exploration with respect to skill and creativity factors, evaluation for actors and critics using a quantile-based ensemble strategy, and exploiting actors with best skill factor. Theoretical analysis proves the learning stability and bounded estimation bias for the MAMC. The present study examines the performance on a well-known reinforcement learning benchmark MuJoCo. Experimental results show that the proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art deep deterministic based reinforcement learning methods. Experimental analysis also indicates the proposed components are effective. Empirical analysis further investigates the validity of the proposed method, and shows its benefit on complicated problems. The source code can be found at https://github.com/AndyWu101/MAMC.
title Multi-Actor Multi-Critic Deep Deterministic Reinforcement Learning with a Novel Q-Ensemble Method
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.01083