Papers › Generalization to New Actions in Reinforcement Learning

Generalization to New Actions in Reinforcement Learning

3 Nov 2020ICML 2020 1arXiv:2011.01928archive 2025-07-28

Ayush Jain, Andrew Szot, Joseph J. Lim

A fundamental trait of intelligence is the ability to achieve goals in the face of novel circumstances, such as making decisions from new action choices. However, standard reinforcement learning assumes a fixed set of actions and requires expensive retraining when given a new action set. To make learning agents more adaptable, we introduce the problem of zero-shot generalization to new actions. We propose a two-stage framework where the agent first infers action representations from action information acquired separately from the task. A policy flexible to varying action sets is then trained with generalization objectives. We benchmark generalization on sequential tasks, such as selecting from an unseen tool-set to solve physical reasoning puzzles and stacking towers with novel 3D shapes. Videos and code are available at https://sites.google.com/view/action-generalization

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