AI RESEARCH
Dissecting Discrete Soft Actor-Critic: Limitations and Principled Alternatives
arXiv CS.AI
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ArXi:2509.09838v2 Announce Type: replace-cross While Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) is highly effective in continuous control, its discrete counterpart (DSAC) performs poorly on challenging discrete-action domains such as Atari. Consequently, starting from DSAC, we revisit the design of actor-critic methods in this setting. First, we determine that the coupling between the actor and critic entropy is the primary reason behind the poor performance of DSAC. We nstrate that by merely decoupling these components, DSAC's performance significantly improves. Motivated by this insight, we.