4. Actor-Critic method
In the REINFORCE with baseline method, the value is used as a baseline. It is not used to train the value function. In this section, we introduce a variation of REINFORCE with baseline, called the Actor-Critic method. The policy and value networks play the roles of actor and critic networks. The policy network is the actor deciding which action to take given the state. Meanwhile, the value network evaluates the decision made by the actor or policy network.
The value network acts as a critic that quantifies how good or bad the chosen action undertaken by the actor is. The value network evaluates the state value, , by comparing it with the sum of the reward received, , and the discounted value of the observed next state, . The difference, , is expressed as:
where we dropped the subscripts of r and s for simplicity. Equation 10.4.1 is similar to the temporal differencing in Q-learning discussed in Chapter 9, Deep Reinforcement...