{"paper":{"title":"A Deeper Look at Discounting Mismatch in Actor-Critic Algorithms","license":"http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":["cs.AI"],"primary_cat":"cs.LG","authors_text":"Harm van Seijen, Remi Tachet des Combes, Romain Laroche, Shangtong Zhang, Shimon Whiteson","submitted_at":"2020-10-02T15:51:48Z","abstract_excerpt":"We investigate the discounting mismatch in actor-critic algorithm implementations from a representation learning perspective. Theoretically, actor-critic algorithms usually have discounting for both actor and critic, i.e., there is a $\\gamma^t$ term in the actor update for the transition observed at time $t$ in a trajectory and the critic is a discounted value function. Practitioners, however, usually ignore the discounting ($\\gamma^t$) for the actor while using a discounted critic. We investigate this mismatch in two scenarios. In the first scenario, we consider optimizing an undiscounted obj"},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2010.01069","kind":"arxiv","version":4},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2010.01069/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}