# ACE : Off-Policy Actor-Critic with Causality-Aware Entropy Regularization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.14528 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14528/

## Key facts

- Cited by 16 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in RL theory and sample complexity, one of 15 directions in Deep reinforcement learning methods.
- Builds on 54 of its 77 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Feb 2024.

## Placed in

- Deep reinforcement learning methods / [RL theory and sample complexity](https://mlsanity.com/deeprl/rl-theory-and-sample-complexity/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 54)

- [Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06347/) (2017)
- [Soft Actor-Critic: Off-Policy Maximum Entropy Deep Reinforcement Learning with a Stochastic Actor](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.01290/) (2018)
- [Playing Atari with Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.5602/) (2013)
- [Trust Region Policy Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.05477/) (2015)
- [Addressing Function Approximation Error in Actor-Critic Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.09477/) (2018)
- [Deep Reinforcement Learning with Double Q-learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1509.06461/) (2015)
- [Meta-World: A Benchmark and Evaluation for Multi-Task and Meta Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10897/) (2019)
- [Curiosity-driven Exploration by Self-supervised Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.05363/) (2017)
- [Exploration by Random Network Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.12894/) (2018)
- [DeepMind Control Suite](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.00690/) (2018)
- [Learning Complex Dexterous Manipulation with Deep Reinforcement Learning and Demonstrations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.10087/) (2017)
- [Reinforcement Learning with Deep Energy-Based Policies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08165/) (2017)
- [Unifying Count-Based Exploration and Intrinsic Motivation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.01868/) (2016)
- [Learning Quadrupedal Locomotion over Challenging Terrain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11251/) (2020)
- [Data-Efficient Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.08296/) (2018)
- [Planning to Explore via Self-Supervised World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.05960/) (2020)
- [#Exploration: A Study of Count-Based Exploration for Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.04717/) (2016)
- [Randomized Ensembled Double Q-Learning: Learning Fast Without a Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.05982/) (2021)
- [Multi-Goal Reinforcement Learning: Challenging Robotics Environments and Request for Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.09464/) (2018)
- [Count-Based Exploration with Neural Density Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.01310/) (2017)
- [The Primacy Bias in Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.07802/) (2022)
- [Provably Efficient Maximum Entropy Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.02690/) (2018)
- [Never Give Up: Learning Directed Exploration Strategies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.06038/) (2020)
- [Efficient Exploration via State Marginal Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05274/) (2019)
- [Reward-Free Exploration for Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.02794/) (2020)
- [The Dormant Neuron Phenomenon in Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12902/) (2023)
- [Equivalence Between Policy Gradients and Soft Q-Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.06440/) (2017)
- [Causal Discovery from Heterogeneous/Nonstationary Data with Independent Changes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.01672/) (2019)
- [Exploration in Deep Reinforcement Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.00824/) (2022)
- [DAGMA: Learning DAGs via M-matrices and a Log-Determinant Acyclicity Characterization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.08037/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Plasticity Loss in Deep Reinforcement Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.04832/) (2024)
- [MENTOR: Mixture-of-Experts Network with Task-Oriented Perturbation for Visual Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.14972/) (2024)
- [Robots Pre-train Robots: Manipulation-Centric Robotic Representation from Large-Scale Robot Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.22325/) (2024)
- [Towards Efficient Online Tuning of VLM Agents via Counterfactual Soft Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.03792/) (2025)
- [Make-An-Agent: A Generalizable Policy Network Generator with Behavior-Prompted Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10973/) (2024)
- [Measure gradients, not activations! Enhancing neuronal activity in deep reinforcement learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.24061/) (2025)
- [Rethinking Bimanual Robotic Manipulation: Learning with Decoupled Interaction Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09186/) (2025)
- [Failure-Aware RL: Reliable Offline-to-Online Reinforcement Learning with Self-Recovery for Real-World Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.07821/) (2026)
- [Efficient Reinforcement Learning with Semantic and Token Entropy for LLM Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.04359/) (2025)
- [UVIS: Unsupervised Video Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06908/) (2024)
- [BECAUSE: Bilinear Causal Representation for Generalizable Offline Model-based Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10967/) (2024)
- [Offline-to-online Reinforcement Learning for Image-based Grasping with Scarce Demonstrations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.14957/) (2024)
- [Causality-informed Anomaly Detection in Partially Observable Sensor Networks: Moving beyond Correlations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.09742/) (2025)
- [Learning Task-Sufficient World Models by Synergizing Agentic Exploration and Structured Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.04409/) (2026)
- [Causal Policy Learning in Reinforcement Learning: Backdoor-Adjusted Soft Actor-Critic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05445/) (2025)
- [SCQ: Stabilizing Conservative Q-Learning with Sigmoid-Bounded Entropy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.12749/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The varying significance of distinct primitive behaviors during the policy learning process has been overlooked by prior model-free RL algorithms. Leveraging this insight, we explore the causal relationship between different action dimensions and rewards to evaluate the significance of various primitive behaviors during training. We introduce a causality-aware entropy term that effectively identifies and prioritizes actions with high potential impacts for efficient exploration. Furthermore, to prevent excessive focus on specific primitive behaviors, we analyze the gradient dormancy phenomenon and introduce a dormancy-guided reset mechanism to further enhance the efficacy of our method. Our proposed algorithm, ACE: Off-policy Actor-critic with Causality-aware Entropy regularization, demonstrates a substantial performance advantage across 29 diverse continuous control tasks spanning 7 domains compared to model-free RL baselines, which underscores the effectiveness, versatility, and efficient sample efficiency of our approach. Benchmark results and videos are available at https://ace-rl.github.io/.