get action in sac_continuous_action.py

[zichunxx]

Problem Description

Hi! Thanks for this clean script to help me understand sac.

But I have some questions about the implementation of sac's get action function, mainly focused on the following code snippet

cleanrl/cleanrl/sac_continuous_action.py

Lines 139 to 141 in 2d660b6

	# Enforcing Action Bound
	log_prob -= torch.log(self.action_scale * (1 - y_t.pow(2)) + 1e-6)
	log_prob = log_prob.sum(1, keepdim=True)

What is the purpose of this? Thanks!

Checklist

• I have installed dependencies via poetry install (see CleanRL's installation guideline.
• I have checked that there is no similar issue in the repo.
• I have checked the documentation site and found not relevant information in GitHub issues.

[Howuhh]

Usually in SAC we use Normal distribution coupled with tanh to bound action space. However, after such transformation the actual distribution is now not just standard Normal and we can not use it's lob_prob to get the probabilities of actions. This formula accounts for the transformation and gives right probabilities for TanhNormal distribution. See Appendix C in the original paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1801.01290.pdf

[zichunxx]

Thanks for your generous help @Howuhh. Is 1e-6 meant to limit the logarithmic value to approach negative infinity?