  We propose a new algorithm, Mean Actor-Critic (MAC), for discrete-action
continuous-state reinforcement learning. MAC is a policy gradient algorithm
that uses the agent's explicit representation of all action values to estimate
the gradient of the policy, rather than using only the actions that were
actually executed. We prove that this approach reduces variance in the policy
gradient estimate relative to traditional actor-critic methods. We show
empirical results on two control domains and on six Atari games, where MAC is
competitive with state-of-the-art policy search algorithms.
