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Generalising Discrete Action Spaces with Conditional Action Trees

Machine Learning 2021-04-16 v1 Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning

Abstract

There are relatively few conventions followed in reinforcement learning (RL) environments to structure the action spaces. As a consequence the application of RL algorithms to tasks with large action spaces with multiple components require additional effort to adjust to different formats. In this paper we introduce {\em Conditional Action Trees} with two main objectives: (1) as a method of structuring action spaces in RL to generalise across several action space specifications, and (2) to formalise a process to significantly reduce the action space by decomposing it into multiple sub-spaces, favoring a multi-staged decision making approach. We show several proof-of-concept experiments validating our scheme, ranging from environments with basic discrete action spaces to those with large combinatorial action spaces commonly found in RTS-style games.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2104.07294,
  title  = {Generalising Discrete Action Spaces with Conditional Action Trees},
  author = {Christopher Bamford and Alvaro Ovalle},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2104.07294},
  year   = {2021}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-24T01:11:24.204Z