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Main Authors: Zhang, Wenbo, Cai, Hengrui
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.04187
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author Zhang, Wenbo
Cai, Hengrui
author_facet Zhang, Wenbo
Cai, Hengrui
contents Deep reinforcement learning (RL) has gained widespread adoption in recent years but faces significant challenges, particularly in unknown and complex environments. Among these, high-dimensional action selection stands out as a critical problem. Existing works often require a sophisticated prior design to eliminate redundancy in the action space, relying heavily on domain expert experience or involving high computational complexity, which limits their generalizability across different RL tasks. In this paper, we address these challenges by proposing a general data-driven action selection approach with model-free and computationally friendly properties. Our method not only selects minimal sufficient actions but also controls the false discovery rate via knockoff sampling. More importantly, we seamlessly integrate the action selection into deep RL methods during online training. Empirical experiments validate the established theoretical guarantees, demonstrating that our method surpasses various alternative techniques in terms of both performance in variable selection and overall achieved rewards.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_04187
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Where to Intervene: Action Selection in Deep Reinforcement Learning
Zhang, Wenbo
Cai, Hengrui
Machine Learning
Deep reinforcement learning (RL) has gained widespread adoption in recent years but faces significant challenges, particularly in unknown and complex environments. Among these, high-dimensional action selection stands out as a critical problem. Existing works often require a sophisticated prior design to eliminate redundancy in the action space, relying heavily on domain expert experience or involving high computational complexity, which limits their generalizability across different RL tasks. In this paper, we address these challenges by proposing a general data-driven action selection approach with model-free and computationally friendly properties. Our method not only selects minimal sufficient actions but also controls the false discovery rate via knockoff sampling. More importantly, we seamlessly integrate the action selection into deep RL methods during online training. Empirical experiments validate the established theoretical guarantees, demonstrating that our method surpasses various alternative techniques in terms of both performance in variable selection and overall achieved rewards.
title Where to Intervene: Action Selection in Deep Reinforcement Learning
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.04187