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A Max-Min Entropy Framework for Reinforcement Learning

Machine Learning 2021-12-21 v3 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a max-min entropy framework for reinforcement learning (RL) to overcome the limitation of the soft actor-critic (SAC) algorithm implementing the maximum entropy RL in model-free sample-based learning. Whereas the maximum entropy RL guides learning for policies to reach states with high entropy in the future, the proposed max-min entropy framework aims to learn to visit states with low entropy and maximize the entropy of these low-entropy states to promote better exploration. For general Markov decision processes (MDPs), an efficient algorithm is constructed under the proposed max-min entropy framework based on disentanglement of exploration and exploitation. Numerical results show that the proposed algorithm yields drastic performance improvement over the current state-of-the-art RL algorithms.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2106.10517,
  title  = {A Max-Min Entropy Framework for Reinforcement Learning},
  author = {Seungyul Han and Youngchul Sung},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2106.10517},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

Accepted to NeurIPS 2021

R2 v1 2026-06-24T03:23:18.878Z