  Actor-critic methods, a type of model-free Reinforcement Learning, have been
successfully applied to challenging tasks in continuous control, often
achieving state-of-the art performance. However, wide-scale adoption of these
methods in real-world domains is made difficult by their poor sample
efficiency. We address this problem both theoretically and empirically. On the
theoretical side, we identify two phenomena preventing efficient exploration in
existing state-of-the-art algorithms such as Soft Actor Critic. First,
combining a greedy actor update with a pessimistic estimate of the critic leads
to the avoidance of actions that the agent does not know about, a phenomenon we
call pessimistic underexploration. Second, current algorithms are directionally
uninformed, sampling actions with equal probability in opposite directions from
the current mean. This is wasteful, since we typically need actions taken along
certain directions much more than others. To address both of these phenomena,
we introduce a new algorithm, Optimistic Actor Critic, which approximates a
lower and upper confidence bound on the state-action value function. This
allows us to apply the principle of optimism in the face of uncertainty to
perform directed exploration using the upper bound while still using the lower
bound to avoid overestimation. We evaluate OAC in several challenging
continuous control tasks, achieving state-of the art sample efficiency.
