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State entropy regularization has empirically shown better exploration and sample complexity in reinforcement learning (RL). However, its theoretical guarantees have not been studied. In this paper, we show that state entropy regularization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Yonatan Ashlag , Uri Koren , Mirco Mutti , Esther Derman , Pierre-Luc Bacon , Shie Mannor

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has demonstrated a huge potential in learning optimal policies without any prior knowledge of the process to be controlled. Model Predictive Control (MPC) is a popular control technique which is able to deal with…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2019-04-10 Mario Zanon , Sébastien Gros , Alberto Bemporad

Mastering deep reinforcement learning (DRL) proves challenging in tasks featuring scant rewards. These limited rewards merely signify whether the task is partially or entirely accomplished, necessitating various exploration actions before…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-11 Guojian Wang , Faguo Wu , Xiao Zhang

Long-term training of large language models (LLMs) requires maintaining stable exploration to prevent the model from collapsing into sub-optimal behaviors. Entropy is crucial in this context, as it controls exploration and helps avoid…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Kai Yang , Xin Xu , Yangkun Chen , Weijie Liu , Jiafei Lyu , Zichuan Lin , Deheng Ye , Saiyong Yang

Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a promising approach for learning optimal policies in environments where direct exploration is expensive or unfeasible. However, the adoption of such policies in practice is often challenging, as they…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-03 Aaron Sonabend-W , Junwei Lu , Leo A. Celi , Tianxi Cai , Peter Szolovits

We propose a systematic method based on reinforcement learning (RL) techniques to find the optimal path that can minimize the total entropy production between two equilibrium states of open systems at the same temperature in a given fixed…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2022-06-07 Rongxing Xu

Policy regularization methods such as maximum entropy regularization are widely used in reinforcement learning to improve the robustness of a learned policy. In this paper, we show how this robustness arises from hedging against worst-case…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-29 Rob Brekelmans , Tim Genewein , Jordi Grau-Moya , Grégoire Delétang , Markus Kunesch , Shane Legg , Pedro Ortega

Large language model post-training relies on reinforcement learning to improve model capability and alignment quality. However, the off-policy training paradigm introduces distribution shift, which often pushes the policy beyond the trust…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-24 Zhenpeng Su , Leiyu Pan , Minxuan Lv , Tiehua Mei , Zijia Lin , Yuntao Li , Wenping Hu , Ruiming Tang , Kun Gai , Guorui Zhou

Existing work in continual learning (CL) focuses on mitigating catastrophic forgetting, i.e., model performance deterioration on past tasks when learning a new task. However, the training efficiency of a CL system is under-investigated,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-21 Zifeng Wang , Zheng Zhan , Yifan Gong , Geng Yuan , Wei Niu , Tong Jian , Bin Ren , Stratis Ioannidis , Yanzhi Wang , Jennifer Dy

Safe reinforcement learning (Safe RL) refers to a class of techniques that aim to prevent RL algorithms from violating constraints in the process of decision-making and exploration during trial and error. In this paper, a novel model-free…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-08-14 Homayoun Honari , Mehran Ghafarian Tamizi , Homayoun Najjaran

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a key paradigm for post-training large language models (LLMs), but the widely used Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) often suffers from entropy collapse: exploration quickly disappears, policies…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Chen Wang , Zhaochun Li , Jionghao Bai , Hexuan Deng , Ge Lan , Yue Wang

We propose and study a general framework for regularized Markov decision processes (MDPs) where the goal is to find an optimal policy that maximizes the expected discounted total reward plus a policy regularization term. The extant…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-10-22 Xiang Li , Wenhao Yang , Zhihua Zhang

We study constrained reinforcement learning (CRL) from a novel perspective by setting constraints directly on state density functions, rather than the value functions considered by previous works. State density has a clear physical and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-25 Zengyi Qin , Yuxiao Chen , Chuchu Fan

Entropy regularized algorithms such as Soft Q-learning and Soft Actor-Critic, recently showed state-of-the-art performance on a number of challenging reinforcement learning (RL) tasks. The regularized formulation modifies the standard RL…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-10-15 Elena Smirnova , Elvis Dohmatob

Safe reinforcement learning (safe RL) aims to respect safety requirements while optimizing long-term performance. In many practical applications, however, the problem involves an infinite number of constraints, known as semi-infinite safe…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-07 Jiaming Zhang , Yujie Yang , Haoning Wang , Liping Zhang , Shengbo Eben Li

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a key approach for enhancing reasoning in large language models (LLMs), yet scalable training is often hindered by the rapid collapse of policy entropy, which leads to premature convergence and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Ming Lei , Christophe Baehr

Real-world decision-making tasks are usually partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs), where the state is not fully observable. Recent progress has demonstrated that recurrent reinforcement learning (RL), which consists of a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-27 Fan-Ming Luo , Zuolin Tu , Zefang Huang , Yang Yu

Evolutionary algorithms have been used to evolve a population of actors to generate diverse experiences for training reinforcement learning agents, which helps to tackle the temporal credit assignment problem and improves the exploration…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2023-04-21 Chengpeng Hu , Jiyuan Pei , Jialin Liu , Xin Yao

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising approach for robotic navigation, allowing robots to learn through trial and error. However, real-world robotic tasks often suffer from sparse rewards, leading to inefficient exploration and…

\Episode-based reinforcement learning (ERL) algorithms treat reinforcement learning (RL) as a black-box optimization problem where we learn to select a parameter vector of a controller, often represented as a movement primitive, for a given…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-19 Fabian Otto , Onur Celik , Hongyi Zhou , Hanna Ziesche , Ngo Anh Vien , Gerhard Neumann