English
Related papers

Related papers: When Maximum Entropy Misleads Policy Optimization

200 papers

The fragility of deep neural networks to adversarially-chosen inputs has motivated the need to revisit deep learning algorithms. Including adversarial examples during training is a popular defense mechanism against adversarial attacks. This…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-05-05 Jacob H. Seidman , Mahyar Fazlyab , Victor M. Preciado , George J. Pappas

The optimal objective is a fundamental aspect of reinforcement learning (RL), as it determines how policies are evaluated and optimized. While total return maximization is the ideal objective in RL, discounted return maximization is the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-19 Shuyu Yin , Fei Wen , Peilin Liu , Tao Luo

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has demonstrated a huge potential in learning optimal policies without any prior knowledge of the process to be controlled. Model Predictive Control (MPC) is a popular control technique which is able to deal with…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2019-04-10 Mario Zanon , Sébastien Gros , Alberto Bemporad

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

Stochastic and soft optimal policies resulting from entropy-regularized Markov decision processes (ER-MDP) are desirable for exploration and imitation learning applications. Motivated by the fact that such policies are sensitive with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-03 Tien Mai , Patrick Jaillet

Robust reinforcement learning (RL) aims to find a policy that optimizes the worst-case performance in the face of uncertainties. In this paper, we focus on action robust RL with the probabilistic policy execution uncertainty, in which,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-21 Guanlin Liu , Zhihan Zhou , Han Liu , Lifeng Lai

We consider an entropy-regularized version of optimal density control of deterministic discrete-time linear systems. Entropy regularization, or a maximum entropy (MaxEnt) method for optimal control has attracted much attention especially in…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-08-15 Kaito Ito , Kenji Kashima

We investigate the problem of synthesizing optimal control policies for Markov decision processes (MDPs) with both qualitative and quantitative objectives. Specifically, our goal is to achieve a given linear temporal logic (LTL) task with…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-04-08 Yu Chen , Shaoyuan Li , Xiang Yin

Optimal decision making with limited or no information in stochastic environments where multiple agents interact is a challenging topic in the realm of artificial intelligence. Reinforcement learning (RL) is a popular approach for arriving…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-01-08 Roi Ceren

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a framework to optimize a control policy using rewards that are revealed by the system as a response to a control action. In its standard form, RL involves a single agent that uses its policy to accomplish a…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-11-24 Juan Cervino , Juan Andres Bazerque , Miguel Calvo-Fullana , Alejandro Ribeiro

Multi-task learning (MTL) considers learning a joint model for multiple tasks by optimizing a convex combination of all task losses. To solve the optimization problem, existing methods use an adaptive weight updating scheme, where task…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-22 Yifei He , Shiji Zhou , Guojun Zhang , Hyokun Yun , Yi Xu , Belinda Zeng , Trishul Chilimbi , Han Zhao

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

Ill-posed inverse problems of the form y = X p where y is J-dimensional vector of a data, p is m-dimensional probability vector which cannot be measured directly and matrix X of observable variables is a known J,m matrix, J < m, are…

Mathematical Physics · Physics 2012-08-27 M. Grendar, , M. Grendar

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

Despite the promise of Multi-Task Learning in leveraging complementary knowledge across tasks, existing multi-task optimization (MTO) techniques remain fixated on resolving conflicts via optimizer-centric loss scaling and gradient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Zedong Wang , Siyuan Li , Dan Xu

Reinforcement learning (RL) agents need to be robust to variations in safety-critical environments. While system identification methods provide a way to infer the variation from online experience, they can fail in settings where fast…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-07 Annie Xie , Shagun Sodhani , Chelsea Finn , Joelle Pineau , Amy Zhang

Reinforcement Learning is a powerful framework for training agents to navigate different situations, but it is susceptible to changes in environmental dynamics. However, solving Markov Decision Processes that are robust to changes is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-21 Etash Kumar Guha

Parameter estimation in Markov random fields (MRFs) is a difficult task, in which inference over the network is run in the inner loop of a gradient descent procedure. Replacing exact inference with approximate methods such as loopy belief…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-06-18 Varun Ganapathi , David Vickrey , John Duchi , Daphne Koller

Maximum entropy reinforcement learning (MaxEnt RL) has become a standard framework for sequential decision making, yet its standard Gaussian policy parameterization is inherently unimodal, limiting its ability to model complex multimodal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-13 Xubin Zhou , Yipeng Yang , Zhan Li

Policy regularization methods such as maximum entropy regularization are widely used in reinforcement learning to improve the robustness of a learned policy. In this paper, we show how this robustness arises from hedging against worst-case…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-29 Rob Brekelmans , Tim Genewein , Jordi Grau-Moya , Grégoire Delétang , Markus Kunesch , Shane Legg , Pedro Ortega