Beyond Distributions: Geometric Action Control for Continuous Reinforcement Learning

Gaussian policies have dominated continuous control in deep reinforcement learning (RL), yet they suffer from a fundamental mismatch: their unbounded support requires ad-hoc squashing functions that distort the geometry of bounded action spaces. While von Mises-Fisher (vMF) distributions offer a theoretically grounded alternative on the sphere, their reliance on Bessel functions and rejection sampling hinders practical adoption. We propose Geometric Action Control (GAC), a novel action generation paradigm that preserves the geometric benefits of spherical distributions while textitsimplifying computation. GAC decomposes action generation into a direction vector and a learnable concentration parameter, enabling efficient interpolation between deterministic actions and uniform spherical noise. This design reduces parameter count from (2d) to (d+1), and avoids the (O(dk)) complexity of vMF rejection sampling, achieving simple (O(d)) operations. Empirically, GAC consistently matches or exceeds state-of-the-art methods across six MuJoCo benchmarks, achieving 37.6% improvement over SAC on Ant-v4 and up to 112% on complex DMControl tasks, demonstrating strong performance across diverse benchmarks. Our ablation studies reveal that both spherical normalization and adaptive concentration control are essential to GAC's success. These findings suggest that robust and efficient continuous control does not require complex distributions, but a principled respect for the geometry of action spaces.