Greedy Actor-Critic: A New Conditional Cross-Entropy Method for Policy Improvement. (arXiv:1810.09103v3 [cs.LG] UPDATED)

Many policy gradient methods are variants of Actor-Critic (AC), where a value
function (critic) is learned to facilitate updating the parameterized policy
(actor). The update to the actor involves a log-likelihood update weighted by
the action-values, with the addition of entropy regularization for soft
variants. In this work, we explore an alternative update for the actor, based
on an extension of the cross entropy method (CEM) to condition on inputs
(states). The idea is to start with a broader policy …

actor-critic arxiv cross-entropy entropy improvement policy