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Transformer critic boosts reinforcement learning for long-horizon tasks

Researchers have developed a new sequence-conditioned critic for Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) that uses a lightweight Transformer to model trajectory context. This approach integrates N-step returns without importance sampling, allowing it to capture temporal structure for long-horizon and sparse-reward problems. The method demonstrates consistent performance improvements over standard SAC and other baselines on local-motion benchmarks, particularly for long-trajectory control tasks. AI

IMPACT Enhances reinforcement learning capabilities for complex, long-horizon tasks by improving value estimation.

RANK_REASON The cluster contains an academic paper detailing a new method for reinforcement learning. [lever_c_demoted from research: ic=1 ai=1.0]

Read on arXiv cs.LG →

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COVERAGE [1]

  1. arXiv cs.LG TIER_1 English(EN) · Dong Tian, Onur Celik, Gerhard Neumann ·

    Chunking the Critic: A Transformer-based Soft Actor-Critic with N-Step Returns

    arXiv:2503.03660v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce a sequence-conditioned critic for Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) that models trajectory context with a lightweight Transformer and trains on aggregated $N$-step targets. Unlike prior approaches that (i) score state-action …