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This paper investigates the computational complexity of reinforcement learning in a novel linear function approximation regime, termed partial $q^{\pi}$-realizability. In this framework, the objective is to learn an $\epsilon$-optimal…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-31 Shayan Karimi , Xiaoqi Tan

Modern deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are motivated by either the generalised policy iteration (GPI) or trust-region learning (TRL) frameworks. However, algorithms that strictly respect these theoretical frameworks have proven…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-21 Jakub Grudzien Kuba , Christian Schroeder de Witt , Jakob Foerster

We propose a general framework for entropy-regularized average-reward reinforcement learning in Markov decision processes (MDPs). Our approach is based on extending the linear-programming formulation of policy optimization in MDPs to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-05-23 Gergely Neu , Anders Jonsson , Vicenç Gómez

Deep Reinforcement Learning (Deep RL) has had incredible achievements on high dimensional problems, yet its learning process remains unstable even on the simplest tasks. Deep RL uses neural networks as function approximators. These neural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-18 Riccardo Della Vecchia , Alena Shilova , Philippe Preux , Riad Akrour

In this effort, we consider the impact of regularization on the diversity of actions taken by policies generated from reinforcement learning agents trained using a policy gradient. Policy gradient agents are prone to entropy collapse, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-10 Andrew Starnes , Anton Dereventsov , Clayton Webster

Recent successful deep reinforcement learning algorithms, such as Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO) or Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), are fundamentally variations of conservative policy iteration (CPI). These algorithms iterate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-27 Erinc Merdivan , Sten Hanke , Matthieu Geist

Sequence prediction models can be learned from example sequences with a variety of training algorithms. Maximum likelihood learning is simple and efficient, yet can suffer from compounding error at test time. Reinforcement learning such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-02 Bowen Tan , Zhiting Hu , Zichao Yang , Ruslan Salakhutdinov , Eric Xing

Projected policy gradient under the simplex parameterization, policy gradient and natural policy gradient under the softmax parameterization, are fundamental algorithms in reinforcement learning. There have been a flurry of recent…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-04-12 Jiacai Liu , Wenye Li , Ke Wei

One of the fundamental challenges for offline reinforcement learning (RL) is ensuring robustness to data distribution. Whether the data originates from a near-optimal policy or not, we anticipate that an algorithm should demonstrate its…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-18 Xiaohan Hu , Yi Ma , Chenjun Xiao , Yan Zheng , Jianye Hao

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

This work uses the entropy-regularised relaxed stochastic control perspective as a principled framework for designing reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. Herein agent interacts with the environment by generating noisy controls…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-18 Lukasz Szpruch , Tanut Treetanthiploet , Yufei Zhang

Regularization is one of the most important techniques in reinforcement learning algorithms. The well-known soft actor-critic algorithm is a special case of regularized policy iteration where the regularizer is chosen as Shannon entropy.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-12 Zeyang Li , Chuxiong Hu , Yunan Wang , Guojian Zhan , Jie Li , Shengbo Eben Li

Regularization of control policies using entropy can be instrumental in adjusting predictability of real-world systems. Applications benefiting from such approaches range from, e.g., cybersecurity, which aims at maximal unpredictability, to…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-02-18 Menno van Zutphen , Giannis Delimpaltadakis , Maurice Heemels , Duarte Antunes

Recent advancements in off-policy Reinforcement Learning (RL) have significantly improved sample efficiency, primarily due to the incorporation of various forms of regularization that enable more gradient update steps than traditional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-21 Michal Nauman , Michał Bortkiewicz , Piotr Miłoś , Tomasz Trzciński , Mateusz Ostaszewski , Marek Cygan

Deep Reinforcement Learning (Deep RL) has been receiving increasingly more attention thanks to its encouraging performance on a variety of control tasks. Yet, conventional regularization techniques in training neural networks (e.g., $L_2$…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-30 Zhuang Liu , Xuanlin Li , Bingyi Kang , Trevor Darrell

We propose a policy improvement algorithm for Reinforcement Learning (RL) which is called Rerouted Behavior Improvement (RBI). RBI is designed to take into account the evaluation errors of the Q-function. Such errors are common in RL when…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-12 Elad Sarafian , Aviv Tamar , Sarit Kraus

In reinforcement learning (RL), Q-learning is a fundamental algorithm whose convergence is guaranteed in the tabular setting. However, this convergence guarantee does not hold under linear function approximation. To overcome this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Hyukjun Yang , Han-Dong Lim , Donghwan Lee

This paper proposes and analyzes two new policy learning methods: regularized policy gradient (RPG) and iterative policy optimization (IPO), for a class of discounted linear-quadratic control (LQC) problems over an infinite time horizon…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-08 Xin Guo , Xinyu Li , Renyuan Xu

Reinforcement learning (RL) is currently one of the most prominent methods for optimizing dynamical systems, with breakthrough results across various fields. The framework is based on the concept of a Markov decision process (MDP), leading…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-11-17 Rene Carmona , Mathieu Lauriere

Various methods for solving the inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) problem have been developed independently in machine learning and economics. In particular, the method of Maximum Causal Entropy IRL is based on the perspective of entropy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-05 Navyata Sanghvi , Shinnosuke Usami , Mohit Sharma , Joachim Groeger , Kris Kitani