Mean Actor Critic

We propose a new algorithm, Mean Actor-Critic (MAC), for discrete-action continuous-state reinforcement learning. MAC is a policy gradient algorithm that uses the agent’s explicit representation of all action values to estimate the gradient of the policy, rather than using only the actions that were actually executed. This significantly reduces variance in the gradient updates and removes the need for a variance reduction baseline. We show empirical results on two control domains where MAC performs as well as or better than other policy gradient approaches, and on five Atari games, where MAC is competitive with state-of-the-art policy search algorithms.