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abstract indexed · arXiv 2610.20463 · updated 2026-10-18

Selective Growing Q-Networks (SGQN): An Analysis of Adaptive Action Grids in Decoupled Q-Learning

First page of Selective Growing Q-Networks (SGQN): An Analysis of Adaptive Action Grids in Decoupled Q-Learning
From the original paper · arXiv 2610.20463Page 1. Select the image to read the PDF.

SGQN replaces uniform coarse-to-fine action-grid growth in decoupled value-based continuous control with an adaptive grid that adds bins near high-Q bins and prunes low-Q ones, using epsilon-greedy selection. It costs nothing extra in principle, but the paper's own ablation shows the adaptive grid activates all bins and behaves like uniform growth, pruning changes returns by at most 1.1%, and the real drivers are coarse initialization and epsilon-greedy exploration; it also uses one gradient update per environment step, an uncontrolled confound versus baselines. What can fail after adoption: the claimed benefit may not transfer, since the advantage cannot be attributed to the adaptive grid, an annealed softmax collapses returns by 23-100%, and fine-grid initialization produces collapsed seeds.

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Selective growing action grids for decoupled Q-learning
published
2026-10-14

This is a reinforcement-learning method for continuous control with honest negative ablations and uncontrolled confounds, so it offers no validated, attributable gain worth adopting in a constrained-infrastructure LLM-oriented production practice.

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  1. claim 01Paperraft inference
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    SGQN replaces uniform coarse-to-fine action-grid growth in decoupled value-based continuous control with an adaptive grid that adds bins near high-Q bins and prunes low-Q ones, using epsilon-greedy selection. It costs nothing extra in principle, but the paper's own ablation shows the adaptive grid activates all bins and behaves like uniform growth, pruning changes returns by at most 1.1%, and the real drivers are coarse initialization and epsilon-greedy exploration; it also uses one gradient update per environment step, an uncontrolled confound versus baselines. What can fail after adoption: the claimed benefit may not transfer, since the advantage cannot be attributed to the adaptive grid, an annealed softmax collapses returns by 23-100%, and fine-grid initialization produces collapsed seeds.

    This is a Paperraft inference. It is not pinned to a verified PDF passage.

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  2. claim 02Paperraft inference

    Highest mean final return on 4 of 8 DMControl tasks, within 1.1% of best on three more, 3.4% below Bang-Bang MPO on Walker Run; no multiplicative speed, memory, or cost claim.

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