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Model-free reinforcement learning based methods such as Proximal Policy Optimization, or Q-learning typically require thousands of interactions with the environment to approximate the optimum controller which may not always be feasible in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-16 Narendra Patwardhan , Zequn Wang

Model-free deep-reinforcement-based learning algorithms have been applied to a range of COPs~\cite{bello2016neural}~\cite{kool2018attention}~\cite{nazari2018reinforcement}. However, these approaches suffer from two key challenges when…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-01 Nasrin Sultana , Jeffrey Chan , Tabinda Sarwar , A. K. Qin

We introduce Implicit Policy, a general class of expressive policies that can flexibly represent complex action distributions in reinforcement learning, with efficient algorithms to compute entropy regularized policy gradients. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-05 Yunhao Tang , Shipra Agrawal

Reinforcement learning offers the promise of automating the acquisition of complex behavioral skills. However, compared to commonly used and well-understood supervised learning methods, reinforcement learning algorithms can be brittle,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-01 Aviral Kumar , Xue Bin Peng , Sergey Levine

As autonomous robots move into complex, dynamic real-world environments, they must learn to navigate safely in real time, yet anticipating all possible behaviors is infeasible. We propose a composable, model-free reinforcement learning…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-02-16 Xinhuan Sang , Abdelrahman Abdelgawad , Roberto Tron

Dealing with high variance is a significant challenge in model-free reinforcement learning (RL). Existing methods are unreliable, exhibiting high variance in performance from run to run using different initializations/seeds. Focusing on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-15 Richard Cheng , Abhinav Verma , Gabor Orosz , Swarat Chaudhuri , Yisong Yue , Joel W. Burdick

Entropic regularization of policies in Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a commonly used heuristic to ensure that the learned policy explores the state-space sufficiently before overfitting to a local optimal policy. The primary motivation for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-19 Hisham Husain , Kamil Ciosek , Ryota Tomioka

Score-function based methods for policy learning, such as REINFORCE and PPO, have delivered strong results in game-playing and robotics, yet their high variance often undermines training stability. Using pathwise policy gradients, i.e.…

When deploying artificial agents in real-world environments where they interact with humans, it is crucial that their behavior is aligned with the values, social norms or other requirements of that environment. However, many environments…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-05 Mattijs Baert , Pietro Mazzaglia , Sam Leroux , Pieter Simoens

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

In reinforcement learning, we encode the potential behaviors of an agent interacting with an environment into an infinite set of policies, the policy space, typically represented by a family of parametric functions. Dealing with such a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-23 Mirco Mutti , Stefano Del Col , Marcello Restelli

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

We present an algorithm for local, regularized, policy improvement in reinforcement learning (RL) that allows us to formulate model-based and model-free variants in a single framework. Our algorithm can be interpreted as a natural extension…

We study the problem of learning exploration-exploitation strategies that effectively adapt to dynamic environments, where the task may change over time. While RNN-based policies could in principle represent such strategies, in practice…

While recent progress has spawned very powerful machine learning systems, those agents remain extremely specialized and fail to transfer the knowledge they gain to similar yet unseen tasks. In this paper, we study a simple reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-15 Remi Tachet , Philip Bachman , Harm van Seijen

The generalisation and robustness properties of policies learnt through Maximum-Entropy Reinforcement Learning are investigated on chaotic dynamical systems with Gaussian noise on the observable. First, the robustness under noise…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-25 Rémy Hosseinkhan-Boucher , Onofrio Semeraro , Lionel Mathelin

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a critical method for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, continuous training often leads to policy entropy collapse,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Kun Chen , Peng Shi , Fanfan Liu , Haibo Qiu , Zhixiong Zeng , Siqi Yang , Wenji Mao

The policy gradient method enjoys the simplicity of the objective where the agent optimizes the cumulative reward directly. Moreover, in the continuous action domain, parameterized distribution of action distribution allows easy control of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-16 Md Masudur Rahman , Yexiang Xue

This paper investigates the so-called reward-balancing methods, a novel class of algorithms for solving discounted-return reinforcement learning (RL) problems. These methods consist of iteratively adjusting the reward function to transform…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-23 Simone Baroncini , Bahman Gharesifard , Giuseppe Notarstefano

Maximum entropy deep reinforcement learning (RL) methods have been demonstrated on a range of challenging continuous tasks. However, existing methods either suffer from severe instability when training on large off-policy data or cannot…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-10 Wenjie Shi , Shiji Song , Cheng Wu