Title: Boosting the Actor with Dual Critic,
Abstract: This paper proposes a new actor-critic-style algorithm called Dual
Actor-Critic or Dual-AC. It is derived in a principled way from the Lagrangian
dual form of the Bellman optimality equation, which can be viewed as a
two-player game between the actor and a critic-like function, which is named as
dual critic. Compared to its actor-critic relatives, Dual-AC has the desired
property that the actor and dual critic are updated cooperatively to optimize
the same objective function, providing a more transparent way for learning the
critic that is directly related to the objective function of the actor. We then
provide a concrete algorithm that can effectively solve the minimax
optimization problem, using techniques of multi-step bootstrapping, path
regularization, and stochastic dual ascent algorithm. We demonstrate that the
proposed algorithm achieves the state-of-the-art performances across several
benchmarks.