Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents often struggle in real-world applications where environmental conditions are non-stationary, particularly when reward functions shift or the available action space expands. This paper introduces MORPHIN, a self-adaptive Q-learning framework that enables on-the-fly adaptation without full retraining. By integrating concept drift detection with dynamic adjustments to learning and exploration hyperparameters, MORPHIN adapts agents to changes in both the reward function and on-the-fly expansions of the agent's action space, while preserving prior policy knowledge to prevent catastrophic forgetting. We validate our approach using a Gridworld benchmark and a traffic signal control simulation. The results demonstrate that MORPHIN achieves superior convergence speed and continuous adaptation compared to a standard Q-learning baseline, improving learning efficiency by up to 1.7x.
@article{arxiv.2601.20714,
title = {Adapting the Behavior of Reinforcement Learning Agents to Changing Action Spaces and Reward Functions},
author = {Raul de la Rosa and Ivana Dusparic and Nicolas Cardozo},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.20714},
year = {2026}
}