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Main Authors: Han, Shuai, Dastani, Mehdi, Wang, Shihan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.10598
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author Han, Shuai
Dastani, Mehdi
Wang, Shihan
author_facet Han, Shuai
Dastani, Mehdi
Wang, Shihan
contents Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) may explore infeasible actions during training and execution. Existing approaches assume a symbol grounding function that maps high-dimensional states to consistent symbolic representations and a manually specified action masking techniques to constrain actions. In this paper, we propose Neuro-symbolic Action Masking (NSAM), a novel framework that automatically learn symbolic models, which are consistent with given domain constraints of high-dimensional states, in a minimally supervised manner during the DRL process. Based on the learned symbolic model of states, NSAM learns action masks that rules out infeasible actions. NSAM enables end-to-end integration of symbolic reasoning and deep policy optimization, where improvements in symbolic grounding and policy learning mutually reinforce each other. We evaluate NSAM on multiple domains with constraints, and experimental results demonstrate that NSAM significantly improves sample efficiency of DRL agent while substantially reducing constraint violations.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_10598
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Neuro-symbolic Action Masking for Deep Reinforcement Learning
Han, Shuai
Dastani, Mehdi
Wang, Shihan
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) may explore infeasible actions during training and execution. Existing approaches assume a symbol grounding function that maps high-dimensional states to consistent symbolic representations and a manually specified action masking techniques to constrain actions. In this paper, we propose Neuro-symbolic Action Masking (NSAM), a novel framework that automatically learn symbolic models, which are consistent with given domain constraints of high-dimensional states, in a minimally supervised manner during the DRL process. Based on the learned symbolic model of states, NSAM learns action masks that rules out infeasible actions. NSAM enables end-to-end integration of symbolic reasoning and deep policy optimization, where improvements in symbolic grounding and policy learning mutually reinforce each other. We evaluate NSAM on multiple domains with constraints, and experimental results demonstrate that NSAM significantly improves sample efficiency of DRL agent while substantially reducing constraint violations.
title Neuro-symbolic Action Masking for Deep Reinforcement Learning
topic Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.10598