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Following [21, 23], the present work investigates a new relative entropy-regularized algorithm for solving the optimal transport on a graph problem within the randomized shortest paths formalism. More precisely, a unit flow is injected into…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-21 Sylvain Courtain , Guillaume Guex , Ilkka Kivimaki , Marco Saerens

Maximum entropy reinforcement learning integrates exploration into policy learning by providing additional intrinsic rewards proportional to the entropy of some distribution. In this paper, we propose a novel approach in which the intrinsic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Adrien Bolland , Gaspard Lambrechts , Damien Ernst

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

In the unsupervised pre-training for reinforcement learning, the agent aims to learn a prior policy for downstream tasks without relying on task-specific reward functions. We focus on state entropy maximization (SEM), where the goal is to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-12 Jongmin Lee , Meiqi Sun , Pieter Abbeel

The state space dynamics representation is the most general approach for nonlinear systems and often chosen for system identification. During training, the state trajectory can deform significantly leading to poor data coverage of the state…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-11 Hermann Klein , Max Heinz Herkersdorf , Oliver Nelles

Training LLM agents in multi-turn environments with sparse rewards, where completing a single task requires 30+ turns of interaction within an episode, presents a fundamental challenge for reinforcement learning. We identify a critical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Wujiang Xu , Wentian Zhao , Zhenting Wang , Yu-Jhe Li , Can Jin , Mingyu Jin , Kai Mei , Kun Wan , Dimitris N. Metaxas

Entropy regularization is an efficient technique for encouraging exploration and preventing a premature convergence of (vanilla) policy gradient methods in reinforcement learning (RL). However, the theoretical understanding of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-16 Yuhao Ding , Junzi Zhang , Hyunin Lee , Javad Lavaei

This paper focuses on stochastic optimal control problems with constraints in law, which are rewritten as optimization (minimization) of probability measures problem on the canonical space. We introduce a penalized version of this type of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-03-18 Thibaut Bourdais , Nadia Oudjane , Francesco Russo

Regularizing neural networks is important for anticipating model behavior in regions of the data space that are not well represented. In this work, we propose a regularization technique for enforcing a level of smoothness in the mapping…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-05 Ali Hasan , Haoming Yang , Yuting Ng , Vahid Tarokh

The goal of regression and classification methods in supervised learning is to minimize the empirical risk, that is, the expectation of some loss function quantifying the prediction error under the empirical distribution. When facing scarce…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-07-15 Soroosh Shafieezadeh-Abadeh , Daniel Kuhn , Peyman Mohajerin Esfahani

Entropy augmented to reward is known to soften the greedy argmax policy to softmax policy. Entropy augmentation is reformulated and leads to a motivation to introduce an additional entropy term to the objective function in the form of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-08 Donghoon Lee

Natural policy gradient (NPG) methods are among the most widely used policy optimization algorithms in contemporary reinforcement learning. This class of methods is often applied in conjunction with entropy regularization -- an algorithmic…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-09-13 Shicong Cen , Chen Cheng , Yuxin Chen , Yuting Wei , Yuejie Chi

Multi-Agent Proximal Policy Optimization (MAPPO) is a variant of the Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) algorithm, specifically tailored for multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). MAPPO optimizes cooperative multi-agent settings by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Changha Lee , Gyusang Cho

Domain randomization in reinforcement learning is an established technique for increasing the robustness of control policies trained in simulation. By randomizing environment properties during training, the learned policy can become robust…

The problem of pure exploration in Markov decision processes has been cast as maximizing the entropy over the state distribution induced by the agent's policy, an objective that has been extensively studied. However, little attention has…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-19 Riccardo Zamboni , Duilio Cirino , Marcello Restelli , Mirco Mutti

A promising technique for exploration is to maximize the entropy of visited state distribution, i.e., state entropy, by encouraging uniform coverage of visited state space. While it has been effective for an unsupervised setup, it tends to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-12 Dongyoung Kim , Jinwoo Shin , Pieter Abbeel , Younggyo Seo

Many problems in Reinforcement Learning (RL) seek an optimal policy with large discrete multidimensional yet unordered action spaces; these include problems in randomized allocation of resources such as placements of multiple security…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-28 Changyu Chen , Ramesha Karunasena , Thanh Hong Nguyen , Arunesh Sinha , Pradeep Varakantham

In reinforcement learning (RL), it is often advantageous to consider additional constraints on the action space to ensure safety or action relevance. Existing work on such action-constrained RL faces challenges regarding effective policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Roland Stolz , Michael Eichelbeck , Matthias Althoff

Maximum entropy (MaxEnt) RL maximizes a combination of the original task reward and an entropy reward. It is believed that the regularization imposed by entropy, on both policy improvement and policy evaluation, together contributes to good…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-01 Haonan Yu , Haichao Zhang , Wei Xu

To encourage diverse exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) for large language models (LLMs) without compromising accuracy, we propose Policy Split, a novel paradigm that bifurcates the policy into normal and high-entropy modes with a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Jiashu Yao , Heyan Huang , Chuwei Luo , Daiqing Wu , Zeming Liu , Yuhang Guo , Yangyang Kang