ā€œTD3: Addressing Function Approximation Error in Actor-Critic Methodsā€, Scott Fujimoto, Herke van Hoof, David Meger2018-02-26 (; backlinks; similar)⁠:

In value-based reinforcement learning methods such as deep Q-learning, function approximation errors are known to lead to overestimated value estimates and suboptimal policies.

We show that this problem persists in an actor-critic setting and propose novel mechanisms to minimize its effects on both the actor and the critic. Our algorithm builds on Double Q-learning, by taking the minimum value between a pair of critics to limit overestimation. We draw the connection between target networks and overestimation bias, and suggest delaying policy updates to reduce per-update error and further improve performance.

We evaluate our method on the suite of OpenAI gym tasks, outperforming the state-of-the-art in every environment tested.