Distributions as Actions: A Unified Framework for Diverse Action Spaces

Researchers introduce a new reinforcement learning framework called Distributions-as-Actions (DA) that treats parameterized action distributions as actions, making all action spaces continuous regardless of original type. The approach includes a new policy gradient estimator (DA-PG) with lower variance and a practical actor-critic algorithm (DA-AC) that shows competitive performance across discrete, continuous, and hybrid control tasks.