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Stochastic Latent Actor-Critic: Deep Reinforcement Learning with a Latent Variable Model

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arxiv 1907.00953 v4 pith:IREHLT72 submitted 2019-07-01 cs.LG cs.AIstat.ML

classification cs.LGcs.AIstat.ML
keywords learninglatentdeepreinforcementstochasticactor-criticalgorithmcontrol
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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Deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms can use high-capacity deep networks to learn directly from image observations. However, these high-dimensional observation spaces present a number of challenges in practice, since the policy must now solve two problems: representation learning and task learning. In this work, we tackle these two problems separately, by explicitly learning latent representations that can accelerate reinforcement learning from images. We propose the stochastic latent actor-critic (SLAC) algorithm: a sample-efficient and high-performing RL algorithm for learning policies for complex continuous control tasks directly from high-dimensional image inputs. SLAC provides a novel and principled approach for unifying stochastic sequential models and RL into a single method, by learning a compact latent representation and then performing RL in the model's learned latent space. Our experimental evaluation demonstrates that our method outperforms both model-free and model-based alternatives in terms of final performance and sample efficiency, on a range of difficult image-based control tasks. Our code and videos of our results are available at our website.

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Cited by 4 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. Self-Predictive Dynamics for Generalization of Vision-based Reinforcement Learning

    cs.CV 2025-06 conditional novelty 7.0 of 10

    A self-supervised auxiliary loss combining weak and strong augmentations, an adversarial discriminator, and inverse-then-forward latent dynamics improves both data efficiency and zero-shot generalization in vision-based RL.

  2. Weights or Skills? A Survey of Robot-Learning Techniques: from Action-Predicting Weights to Robots that Write their Own Skills

    cs.RO 2026-08 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    A taxonomy of robot learning on a weights-versus-skills axis, with a five-rung self-improvement ladder whose top cell (feedback plus memory plus search) holds only a few recent systems.

  3. Self-Supervised Multisensory Pretraining for Contact-Rich Robot Reinforcement Learning

    cs.RO 2025-11 unverdicted novelty 6.0 of 10

    MSDP pre-trains a transformer encoder with masked multisensory autoencoding, then uses an asymmetric actor-critic bridge (cross-attention for critic, pooling for actor) to accelerate and robustify contact-rich RL acro...

  4. rQdia: Regularizing Q-Value Distributions With Image Augmentation

    cs.LG 2025-06 reject novelty 5.0 of 10

    rQdia regularizes Q-value distributions across augmented images, reporting improvements on continuous control and Atari benchmarks over DrQ, SAC, and Data-Efficient Rainbow.

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