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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Hoppe, Heiko, Akkerman, Fabian, van Heeswijk, Wouter, Schiffer, Maximilian
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08616
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Table of Contents:
  • Reinforcement Learning (RL) is increasingly applied to large-scale decision-making problems like logistics, scheduling, and recommender systems, but existing algorithms struggle with the curse of dimensionality in such large discrete action spaces. We propose Distance-Guided Reinforcement Learning (DGRL), combining Sampled Dynamic Neighborhoods and Distance-Based Updates to enable efficient RL in problems with up to $10^{20}$ actions. Unlike prior methods, DGRL performs stochastic volumetric exploration and transforms policy optimization into a stable regression task, decoupling gradient variance from action space cardinality. On structured tasks, DGRL provably guarantees local value improvement. DGRL naturally generalizes to hybrid continuous-discrete action spaces. We demonstrate performance improvements of up to 66% against state-of-the-art benchmarks across regularly and irregularly structured environments, while simultaneously improving convergence speed and computational complexity.