Related papers: Do You Need the Entropy Reward (in Practice)?
Entropy regularization is commonly used to improve policy optimization in reinforcement learning. It is believed to help with \emph{exploration} by encouraging the selection of more stochastic policies. In this work, we analyze this claim…
With the increasing pace of automation, modern robotic systems need to act in stochastic, non-stationary, partially observable environments. A range of algorithms for finding parameterized policies that optimize for long-term average…
Maximum Entropy (MaxEnt) reinforcement learning is a powerful learning paradigm which seeks to maximize return under entropy regularization. However, action entropy does not necessarily coincide with state entropy, e.g., when multiple…
Entropy regularization is an important idea in reinforcement learning, with great success in recent algorithms like Soft Q Network (SQN) and Soft Actor-Critic (SAC1). In this work, we extend this idea into the on-policy realm. We propose…
Tool-using agents based on Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in tasks such as mathematical reasoning and multi-hop question answering. However, in long trajectories, agents often trigger excessive and low-quality tool calls, increasing…
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…
This paper aims to establish an entropy-regularized value-based reinforcement learning method that can ensure the monotonic improvement of policies at each policy update. Unlike previously proposed lower-bounds on policy improvement in…
Deep reinforcement learning was instigated with the presence of trust region methods, being scalable and efficient. However, the pessimism of such algorithms, among which it forces to constrain in a trust region by all means, has been…
Many real-world human behaviors can be characterized as a sequential decision making processes, such as urban travelers choices of transport modes and routes (Wu et al. 2017). Differing from choices controlled by machines, which in general…
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…
Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms aim to balance exploiting the current best strategy with exploring new options that could lead to higher rewards. Most common RL algorithms use undirected exploration, i.e., select random sequences of…
In reinforcement learning (RL), the ability to utilize prior knowledge from previously solved tasks can allow agents to quickly solve new problems. In some cases, these new problems may be approximately solved by composing the solutions of…
Mixture models are an expressive hypothesis class that can approximate a rich set of policies. However, using mixture policies in the Maximum Entropy (MaxEnt) framework is not straightforward. The entropy of a mixture model is not equal to…
The Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) algorithm with a Gaussian policy has become a mainstream implementation for realizing the Maximum Entropy Reinforcement Learning (MaxEnt RL) objective, which incorporates entropy maximization to encourage…
In reinforcement learning, two objective functions have been developed extensively in the literature: discounted and averaged rewards. The generalization to an entropy-regularized setting has led to improved robustness and exploration for…
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…
The average-reward formulation of reinforcement learning (RL) has drawn increased interest in recent years for its ability to solve temporally-extended problems without relying on discounting. Meanwhile, in the discounted setting,…
Maximum entropy has become a mainstream off-policy reinforcement learning (RL) framework for balancing exploitation and exploration. However, two bottlenecks still limit further performance improvement: (1) non-stationary Q-value estimation…
Inverse reinforcement learning aims to infer the reward function that explains expert behavior observed through trajectories of state--action pairs. A long-standing difficulty in classical IRL is the non-uniqueness of the recovered reward:…
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…