UACER: An Uncertainty-Adaptive Critic Ensemble Framework for Robust Adversarial Reinforcement Learning

Abstract

Robust adversarial reinforcement learning has emerged as an effective paradigm for training agents to handle uncertain disturbance in real environments, with critical applications in sequential decision-making domains such as autonomous driving and robotic control. Within this paradigm, agent training is typically formulated as a zero-sum Markov game between a protagonist and an adversary to enhance policy robustness. However, the trainable nature of the adversary inevitably induces non-stationarity in the learning dynamics, leading to exacerbated training instability and convergence difficulties, particularly in high-dimensional complex environments. In this paper, we propose a novel approach, Uncertainty-Adaptive Critic Ensemble for robust adversarial Reinforcement learning (UACER), which consists of two components: 1) Diversified critic ensemble: A diverse set of K critic networks is employed in parallel to stabilize Q-value estimation in robust adversarial reinforcement learning, reducing variance and enhancing robustness compared to conventional single-critic designs. 2) Time-varying Decay Uncertainty (TDU) mechanism: Moving beyond simple linear combinations, we propose a variance-derived Q-value aggregation strategy that explicitly incorporates epistemic uncertainty to adaptively regulate the exploration-exploitation trade-off while stabilizing the training process. Comprehensive experiments across several challenging MuJoCo control problems validate the superior effectiveness of UACER, outperforming state-of-the-art methods in terms of overall performance, stability, and efficiency.