DAMPER: Return-Prioritized Gradient Control for Smooth Policies
Actor-critic methods achieve strong performance in continuous control, but their policies can produce highly oscillatory actions. A common remedy is to add auxiliary smoothness losses. However, their contribution can be negligible when their gradients are small relative to the native actor gradient. Moreover, existing methods often combine multiple auxiliary losses, complicating loss balancing without necessarily improving the return-smoothness trade-off. We introduce DAMPER (Direction-Aware Magnitude-Controlled Projection with Explicit Return Priority), which combines the native actor gradient with a temporal-consistency gradient through conflict-conditioned projection and adaptive magni...
| Authors | Seokmin Ko, Taewon Goo, Kihyuk Hong |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 30 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 30 September 2026 |
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