TQC (Truncated Quantile Critics)

Overview

TQC is an extension of SAC (Soft Actor-Critic) that uses distributional reinforcement learning with quantile regression to control overestimation bias in the Q-function.

Paper: Controlling Overestimation Bias with Truncated Mixture of Continuous Distributional Quantile Critics

Key Features

• Distributional Critics: Each critic network outputs multiple quantiles instead of a single Q-value
• Multiple Critics: Uses n_critics independent critic networks (default: 2)
• Truncated Targets: Drops the top quantiles when computing target Q-values to reduce overestimation
• Quantile Huber Loss: Uses quantile regression with Huber loss for critic training

Usage

from ray.rllib.algorithms.tqc import TQCConfig

config = (
    TQCConfig()
    .environment("Pendulum-v1")
    .training(
        n_quantiles=25,        # Number of quantiles per critic
        n_critics=2,           # Number of critic networks
        top_quantiles_to_drop_per_net=2,  # Quantiles to drop for bias control
    )
)

algo = config.build()
for _ in range(100):
    result = algo.train()
    print(f"Episode reward mean: {result['env_runners']['episode_reward_mean']}")

Configuration

TQC-Specific Parameters

Inherited from SAC

TQC inherits all SAC parameters including:

• actor_lr, critic_lr, alpha_lr: Learning rates
• tau: Target network update coefficient
• initial_alpha: Initial entropy coefficient
• target_entropy: Target entropy for automatic alpha tuning

Algorithm Details

Critic Update

1. Each critic outputs n_quantiles quantile estimates
2. For target computation:
   • Collect all quantiles from all critics: n_critics * n_quantiles values
   • Sort all quantiles
   • Drop the top top_quantiles_to_drop_per_net * n_critics quantiles
   • Use remaining quantiles as targets
3. Train critics using quantile Huber loss

Actor Update

• Maximize expected Q-value (mean of all quantiles) minus entropy bonus
• Same as SAC but using mean of quantile estimates

Entropy Tuning

• Same as SAC: automatically adjusts temperature parameter α

Differences from SAC

References

@article{kuznetsov2020controlling,
  title={Controlling Overestimation Bias with Truncated Mixture of Continuous Distributional Quantile Critics},
  author={Kuznetsov, Arsenii and Shvechikov, Pavel and Grishin, Alexander and Vetrov, Dmitry},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2005.04269},
  year={2020}
}