Aggressive Q-Learning with Ensembles: Achieving Both High Sample Efficiency and High Asymptotic Performance

Recently, Truncated Quantile Critics (TQC), using distributional representation of critics, was shown to provide state-of-the-art asymptotic training performance on all environments from the MuJoCo continuous control benchmark suite. Also recently, Randomized Ensemble Double Q-Learning (REDQ), using a high update-to-data ratio and target randomization, was shown to achieve high sample efficiency that is competitive with state-of-the-art model-based methods. In this paper, we propose a novel model-free algorithm, Aggressive Q-Learning with Ensembles (AQE), which improves the sample-efficiency performance of REDQ and the asymptotic performance of TQC, thereby providing overall state-of-the-art performance during all stages of training. Moreover, AQE is very simple, requiring neither distributional representation of critics nor target randomization.