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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

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-27 Nir Baram , Guy Tennenholtz , Shie Mannor

While the maximum entropy (MaxEnt) reinforcement learning (RL) framework -- often touted for its exploration and robustness capabilities -- is usually motivated from a probabilistic perspective, the use of deep probabilistic models has not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-13 Dinghuai Zhang , Aaron Courville , Yoshua Bengio , Qinqing Zheng , Amy Zhang , Ricky T. Q. Chen

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-09 Xiaoyi Dong , Jian Cheng , Xi Sheryl Zhang

We provide new perspectives and inference algorithms for Maximum Entropy (MaxEnt) Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL), which provides a principled method to find a most non-committal reward function consistent with given expert…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-08 Aaron J. Snoswell , Surya P. N. Singh , Nan Ye

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

In Multi-Goal Reinforcement Learning, an agent learns to achieve multiple goals with a goal-conditioned policy. During learning, the agent first collects the trajectories into a replay buffer, and later these trajectories are selected…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-26 Rui Zhao , Xudong Sun , Volker Tresp

In the pursuit of finding an optimal policy, reinforcement learning (RL) methods generally ignore the properties of learned policies apart from their expected return. Thus, even when successful, it is difficult to characterize which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-10 Yash Jhaveri , Harley Wiltzer , Patrick Shafto , Marc G. Bellemare , David Meger

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

Diffusion policies are expressive yet incur high inference latency. Flow Matching (FM) enables one-step generation, but integrating it into Maximum Entropy Reinforcement Learning (MaxEnt RL) is challenging: the optimal policy is an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Zeqiao Li , Yijing Wang , Haoyu Wang , Zheng Li , Zhiqiang Zuo

On-policy reinforcement learning methods, like Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO) and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), often demand extensive data per update, leading to sample inefficiency. This paper introduces Reflective Policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-07 Yaozhong Gan , Renye Yan , Zhe Wu , Junliang Xing

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful machine learning technique that enables an intelligent agent to learn an optimal policy that maximizes the cumulative rewards in sequential decision making. Most of methods in the existing…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-01-06 Chengchun Shi , Zhengling Qi , Jianing Wang , Fan Zhou

A novel Policy Gradient (PG) algorithm, called $\textit{Matryoshka Policy Gradient}$ (MPG), is introduced and studied, in the context of fixed-horizon max-entropy reinforcement learning, where an agent aims at maximizing entropy bonuses…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-10 François Ged , Maria Han Veiga

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

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

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

Cumulative entropy regularization introduces a regulatory signal to the reinforcement learning (RL) problem that encourages policies with high-entropy actions, which is equivalent to enforcing small deviations from a uniform reference…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-16 Felix Leibfried , Jordi Grau-Moya

Policy entropy has emerged as a fundamental measure for understanding and controlling exploration in reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) for LLMs. However, existing entropy-aware methods mainly regulate entropy through…

Entropy regularization has been widely used in policy optimization algorithms to enhance exploration and the robustness of the optimal control; however it also introduces an additional regularization bias. This work quantifies the impact of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-03-25 Deven Sethi , David Šiška , Yufei Zhang

Trust region methods, such as TRPO, are often used to stabilize policy optimization algorithms in reinforcement learning (RL). While current trust region strategies are effective for continuous control, they typically require a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-02-26 Ofir Nachum , Mohammad Norouzi , Kelvin Xu , Dale Schuurmans