Papers › Learning State Abstractions for Transfer in Continuous Control

Learning State Abstractions for Transfer in Continuous Control

8 Feb 2020arXiv:2002.05518archive 2025-07-28

Kavosh Asadi, David Abel, Michael L. Littman

Can simple algorithms with a good representation solve challenging reinforcement learning problems? In this work, we answer this question in the affirmative, where we take "simple learning algorithm" to be tabular Q-Learning, the "good representations" to be a learned state abstraction, and "challenging problems" to be continuous control tasks. Our main contribution is a learning algorithm that abstracts a continuous state-space into a discrete one. We transfer this learned representation to unseen problems to enable effective learning. We provide theory showing that learned abstractions maintain a bounded value loss, and we report experiments showing that the abstractions empower tabular Q-Learning to learn efficiently in unseen tasks.

PaperPDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Continuous ControlQ-LearningReinforcement LearningReinforcement Learning (RL)continuous-controlreinforcement-learning

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

Q-Learning

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections