Paper ID: 2205.09123

A2C is a special case of PPO

Shengyi Huang, Anssi Kanervisto, Antonin Raffin, Weixun Wang, Santiago Ontañón, Rousslan Fernand Julien Dossa

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.

Submitted: May 18, 2022