Mechanism

Separates policy updates (actor phase) and value-function distillation/training (auxiliary phase) into distinct alternating phases so value estimation can train for more epochs without corrupting shared representations or destabilizing policy gradients.

Practical Notes

Prevents representation interference when the actor and critic share a backbone.

References

  1. Phasic Policy Gradient ↗

    Karl Cobbe, Jacob Hilton, Oleg Klimov, John Schulman · 2020