Context-Sensitive Abstractions for Reinforcement Learning with Parameterized Actions

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Nayyar, Rashmeet Kaur, Shah, Naman, Srivastava, Siddharth
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Nayyar, Rashmeet Kaur
Shah, Naman
Srivastava, Siddharth
author_facet Nayyar, Rashmeet Kaur
Shah, Naman
Srivastava, Siddharth
contents Real-world sequential decision-making often involves parameterized action spaces that require both, decisions regarding discrete actions and decisions about continuous action parameters governing how an action is executed. Existing approaches exhibit severe limitations in this setting -- planning methods demand hand-crafted action models, and standard reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are designed for either discrete or continuous actions but not both, and the few RL methods that handle parameterized actions typically rely on domain-specific engineering and fail to exploit the latent structure of these spaces. This paper extends the scope of RL algorithms to long-horizon, sparse-reward settings with parameterized actions by enabling agents to autonomously learn both state and action abstractions online. We introduce algorithms that progressively refine these abstractions during learning, increasing fine-grained detail in the critical regions of the state-action space where greater resolution improves performance. Across several continuous-state, parameterized-action domains, our abstraction-driven approach enables TD($λ$) to achieve markedly higher sample efficiency than state-of-the-art baselines.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_20831
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Context-Sensitive Abstractions for Reinforcement Learning with Parameterized Actions
Nayyar, Rashmeet Kaur
Shah, Naman
Srivastava, Siddharth
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Real-world sequential decision-making often involves parameterized action spaces that require both, decisions regarding discrete actions and decisions about continuous action parameters governing how an action is executed. Existing approaches exhibit severe limitations in this setting -- planning methods demand hand-crafted action models, and standard reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are designed for either discrete or continuous actions but not both, and the few RL methods that handle parameterized actions typically rely on domain-specific engineering and fail to exploit the latent structure of these spaces. This paper extends the scope of RL algorithms to long-horizon, sparse-reward settings with parameterized actions by enabling agents to autonomously learn both state and action abstractions online. We introduce algorithms that progressively refine these abstractions during learning, increasing fine-grained detail in the critical regions of the state-action space where greater resolution improves performance. Across several continuous-state, parameterized-action domains, our abstraction-driven approach enables TD($λ$) to achieve markedly higher sample efficiency than state-of-the-art baselines.
title Context-Sensitive Abstractions for Reinforcement Learning with Parameterized Actions
topic Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.20831