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A2C is a special case of PPO

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arxiv 2205.09123 v1 pith:DMQWEGIZ submitted 2022-05-18 cs.LG

classification cs.LG
keywords algorithmscaseobjectivespecialactor-criticadvantageanalysisappears
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Advantage Actor-critic (A2C) and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) are popular deep reinforcement learning algorithms used for game AI in recent years. A common understanding is that A2C and PPO are separate algorithms because PPO's clipped objective appears significantly different than A2C's objective. In this paper, however, we show A2C is a special case of PPO. We present theoretical justifications and pseudocode analysis to demonstrate why. To validate our claim, we conduct an empirical experiment using \texttt{Stable-baselines3}, showing A2C and PPO produce the \textit{exact} same models when other settings are controlled.

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Cited by 1 Pith paper

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

  1. Monte Carlo Beam Search for Actor-Critic Reinforcement Learning in Continuous Control

    cs.AI 2025-05 reject novelty 4.0 of 10

    A TD3 variant that evaluates multiple perturbed actions via short Monte Carlo rollouts reports faster learning and higher returns on HalfCheetah, Walker2d, and Swimmer.

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