Simple Emergent Action Representations from Multi-Task Policy Training
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Abstract (arXiv)
The low-level sensory and motor signals in deep reinforcement learning, which exist in high-dimensional spaces such as image observations or motor torques, are inherently challenging to understand or utilize directly for downstream tasks. While sensory representations have been extensively studied, the representations of motor actions are still an area of active exploration. Our work reveals that a space containing meaningful action representations emerges when a multi-task policy network takes as inputs both states and task embeddings. Moderate constraints are added to improve its representation ability. Therefore, interpolated or composed embeddings can function as a high-level interface within this space, providing instructions to the agent for executing meaningful action sequences. Empirical results demonstrate that the proposed action representations are effective for intra-action interpolation and inter-action composition with limited or no additional learning. Furthermore, our approach exhibits superior task adaptation ability compared to strong baselines in Mujoco locomotion tasks. Our work sheds light on the promising direction of learning action representations for efficient, adaptable, and composable RL, forming the basis of abstract action planning and the understanding of motor signal space. Project page: https://sites.google.com/view/emergent-action-representation/
Key facts. Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 42 of its 57 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 18 Oct 2022.
Builds on
42 of 57 references.
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30 more
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Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2023: 3; 2024: 0; 2025: 2; 2026: 1.
6 papers.
- 2023Rewarded soups: towards Pareto-optimal alignment by interpolating weights fine-tuned on diverse rewardscited by 232
- 2023TACO: Temporal Latent Action-Driven Contrastive Loss for Visual Reinforcement Learningcited by 56
- 2025What Do Latent Action Models Actually Learn?cited by 30
- 2025Neural Motion Simulator: Pushing the Limit of World Models in Reinforcement Learningcited by 11
- 2023DCT: Dual Channel Training of Action Embeddings for Reinforcement Learning with Large Discrete Action Spacescited by 0
- 2026MotionPyramid: Hierarchical Motion Representation and Residual Interfacescited by 0
- 2026MotionPyramid: Hierarchical Motion Representation and Residual Interfaces15 Jun 2026
- 2025What Do Latent Action Models Actually Learn?27 May 2025
- 2025Neural Motion Simulator: Pushing the Limit of World Models in Reinforcement Learning9 Apr 2025
- 2023DCT: Dual Channel Training of Action Embeddings for Reinforcement Learning with Large Discrete Action Spaces28 Jun 2023
- 2023TACO: Temporal Latent Action-Driven Contrastive Loss for Visual Reinforcement Learning22 Jun 2023
- 2023Rewarded soups: towards Pareto-optimal alignment by interpolating weights fine-tuned on diverse rewards7 Jun 2023