Distributional Actor-Critic Ensemble for Uncertainty-Aware Continuous Control
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Abstract (arXiv)
Uncertainty quantification is one of the central challenges for machine learning in real-world applications. In reinforcement learning, an agent confronts two kinds of uncertainty, called epistemic uncertainty and aleatoric uncertainty. Disentangling and evaluating these uncertainties simultaneously stands a chance of improving the agent's final performance, accelerating training, and facilitating quality assurance after deployment. In this work, we propose an uncertainty-aware reinforcement learning algorithm for continuous control tasks that extends the Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient algorithm (DDPG). It exploits epistemic uncertainty to accelerate exploration and aleatoric uncertainty to learn a risk-sensitive policy. We conduct numerical experiments showing that our variant of DDPG outperforms vanilla DDPG without uncertainty estimation in benchmark tasks on robotic control and power-grid optimization.
Key facts. Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 48 of its 76 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 27 Jul 2022.
Builds on
48 of 76 references.
References · 48
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36 more
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