PPO vs SAC vs TD3: Robotic Manipulation Benchmark Results

#reinforcementlearnin #robotics #ppo #sac

SAC Beats PPO on Manipulation — But There's a Catch

SAC achieved 89% success rate on peg insertion while PPO stalled at 61%. And then SAC's policy collapsed on episode 800,000.

I ran this comparison because the standard advice — "SAC for continuous control, PPO for everything else" — felt too vague for production robotics. When you're deploying to a $40k robot arm, you need more than vibes. You need convergence curves, failure modes, and hyperparameter ranges that won't brick your training run.

Here's what I found running PPO, SAC, and TD3 on three robotic manipulation tasks from the MetaWorld benchmark (Gymnasium-Robotics v1.2.4, MuJoCo 3.1.6).