mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

SAVGO: Learning State-Action Value Geometry with Cosine Similarity for Continuous Control

arXiv 2605.00787 ↗First posted 1 May 2026cs.LGcited by 0

Not on the map. Why?

Abstract (arXiv)

While representation and similarity learning have improved the sample efficiency of Reinforcement Learning (RL), they are rarely used to shape policy updates directly in the action space. To bridge this gap, a geometry-aware RL algorithm that explicitly incorporates value-based similarity into the policy update, State-Action Value Geometry Optimization (SAVGO), is proposed. In detail, SAVGO learns a joint state-action embedding space in which pairs with similar action-value estimates exhibit high cosine similarity, while dissimilar pairs are mapped to distinct directions. This learned geometry enables the generation of a similarity kernel over candidate actions sampled at each update, allowing policy improvement to be guided directly toward higher-value regions beyond local gradient-based updates. As a result, representation learning, value estimation, and policy optimization are unified within a single geometry-consistent objective, while preserving the scalability of off-policy actor-critic training. The proposed method is evaluated on standard MuJoCo continuous-control benchmarks, demonstrating improvements over strong baselines on challenging high-dimensional tasks. Ablation studies are done to analyze the contributions of value-geometry learning and similarity-based policy updates.

Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 25 of its 36 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 1 May 2026.

Builds on

25 of 36 references.

References · 25

  1. 2017Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithmscited by 14,441
  2. 2020A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representationscited by 11,979
  3. 2018Soft Actor-Critic: Off-Policy Maximum Entropy Deep Reinforcement Learning with a Stochastic Actorcited by 4,635
  4. 2018Addressing Function Approximation Error in Actor-Critic Methodscited by 2,302
  5. 2020CURL: Contrastive Unsupervised Representations for Reinforcement Learningcited by 745
  6. 2020Image Augmentation Is All You Need: Regularizing Deep Reinforcement Learning from Pixelscited by 573
  7. 2020Learning Invariant Representations for Reinforcement Learning without Reconstructioncited by 424
  8. 2018Maximum a Posteriori Policy Optimisationcited by 318
  9. 2020Data-Efficient Reinforcement Learning with Self-Predictive Representationscited by 309
  10. 2021Randomized Ensembled Double Q-Learning: Learning Fast Without a Modelcited by 278
  11. 2020Decoupling Representation Learning from Reinforcement Learningcited by 263
  12. 2020Controlling Overestimation Bias with Truncated Mixture of Continuous Distributional Quantile Criticscited by 154
13 more
  1. 2017Neural Episodic Controlcited by 148
  2. 2023For SALE: State-Action Representation Learning for Deep Reinforcement Learningcited by 73
  3. 2020The Value-Improvement Path: Towards Better Representations for Reinforcement Learningcited by 60
  4. 2021Towards Robust Bisimulation Metric Learningcited by 49
  5. 2021MICo: Improved representations via sampling-based state similarity for Markov decision processescited by 43
  6. 2021Return-Based Contrastive Representation Learning for Reinforcement Learningcited by 36
  7. 2022Value-Consistent Representation Learning for Data-Efficient Reinforcement Learningcited by 15
  8. 2021Theoretically Principled Deep RL Acceleration via Nearest Neighbor Function Approximationcited by 10
  9. 2024Learning Action-based Representations Using Invariancecited by 5
  10. 2026Improving Policy Exploitation in Online Reinforcement Learning with Instant Retrospect Actioncited by 4
  11. 2025Reward-Aware Proto-Representations in Reinforcement Learningcited by 3
  12. 2025Understanding Behavioral Metric Learning: A Large-Scale Study on Distracting Reinforcement Learning Environmentscited by 3
  13. 2026Task-Aware Exploration via a Predictive Bisimulation Metriccited by 1

Built on by

Not cited yet.