Proximal Deterministic Policy Gradient

Abstract: This paper introduces two simple techniques to improve off-policy Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms. First, we formulate off-policy RL as a stochastic proximal point iteration. The target network plays the role of the variable of optimization and the value network computes the proximal operator. Second, we exploits the two value functions commonly employed in state-of-the-art off-policy algorithms to provide an improved action value estimate through bootstrapping with limited increase of computational resources. Further, we demonstrate significant performance improvement over state-of-the-art algorithms on standard continuous-control RL benchmarks.