Multi-Alpha Soft Actor-Critic: Overcoming Stochastic Biases in Maximum Entropy Reinforcement Learning

Conor Igoe, Swapnil Pande, Siddarth Venkatraman, Jeff G. Schneider

Abstract: The successful application of robotic control requires intelligent decision-making to handle the long tail of complex scenarios that arise in real-world environments. Recently, Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has provided a data-driven framework to automatically learn effective policies in such complex settings. Since its introduction in 2018, Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) remains as one of the most popular off-policy DRL algorithms and has been used extensively to learn performant robotic control policies. However, in this paper we argue that by relying on the maximum entropy formalism to define learning objectives, previous work introduces a significant bias away from optimal decision making, which often requires near-deterministic behaviour for high-precision tasks. Moreover, we show that when training with the original variants of SAC, overcoming this bias by reducing entropy budgets or entropy coefficients introduces separate issues that lead to slow or unstable learning. We address these shortcomings by treating the entropy coefficient <tex>$\alpha$</tex> as a random variable and introduce Multi-Alpha Soft Actor-Critic (MAS). We show how MAS overcomes the stochastic bias of SAC in a variety of robotic control tasks including the CARLA urban-driving simulator, while maintaining the stability and sample efficiency of the original algorithms.