English
Related papers

Related papers: State Entropy Regularization for Robust Reinforcem…

200 papers

Reinforcement learning has become the standard for improving reasoning in large language models, yet evidence increasingly suggests that RL does not teach new strategies; it redistributes probability mass over solutions the base model…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Ömer Faruk Akgül , Rajgopal Kannan , Willie Neiswanger , Viktor Prasanna

Accuracy and generalization of dynamics models is key to the success of model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL). As the complexity of tasks increases, so does the sample inefficiency of learning accurate dynamics models. However, many…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-08 Manan Tomar , Amy Zhang , Roberto Calandra , Matthew E. Taylor , Joelle Pineau

Recently, reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has been widely used for enhancing the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). A core challenge in RLVR involves managing the exchange between entropy and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Jia Deng , Jie Chen , Zhipeng Chen , Wayne Xin Zhao , Ji-Rong Wen

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has substantially improved the reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs), but it often suffers from \textit{restricted exploration}, where the policy rapidly concentrates on a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Hengrui Gu , Xiaotian Han , Yujing Bian , Feiyi Wang , Kaixiong Zhou

We study the sparse entropy-regularized reinforcement learning (ERL) problem in which the entropy term is a special form of the Tsallis entropy. The optimal policy of this formulation is sparse, i.e.,~at each state, it has non-zero…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-02-13 Ofir Nachum , Yinlam Chow , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh

Reinforcement learning provides an automated framework for learning behaviors from high-level reward specifications, but in practice the choice of reward function can be crucial for good results -- while in principle the reward only needs…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-19 Abhishek Gupta , Aldo Pacchiano , Yuexiang Zhai , Sham M. Kakade , Sergey Levine

Recent deep reinforcement learning (DRL) successes rely on end-to-end learning from fixed-size observational inputs (e.g. image, state-variables). However, many challenging and interesting problems in decision making involve observations or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-08 Vince Jankovics , Michael Garcia Ortiz , Eduardo Alonso

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a prominent paradigm for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, the entropy of LLMs usually collapses during RLVR training, leading…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Renren Jin , Pengzhi Gao , Yuqi Ren , Zhuowen Han , Tongxuan Zhang , Wuwei Huang , Wei Liu , Jian Luan , Deyi Xiong

Studying how to fine-tune offline reinforcement learning (RL) pre-trained policy is profoundly significant for enhancing the sample efficiency of RL algorithms. However, directly fine-tuning pre-trained policies often results in sub-optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-29 Ziqi Zhang , Xiao Xiong , Zifeng Zhuang , Jinxin Liu , Donglin Wang

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

Many real-world applications require an agent to make robust and deliberate decisions with multimodal information (e.g., robots with multi-sensory inputs). However, it is very challenging to train the agent via reinforcement learning (RL)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-21 Jinming Ma , Feng Wu , Yingfeng Chen , Xianpeng Ji , Yu Ding

Adversarial training (AT) has proven to be one of the most effective ways to defend Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) against adversarial attacks. However, the phenomenon of robust overfitting, i.e., the robustness will drop sharply at a certain…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-25 Shudong Zhang , Haichang Gao , Tianwei Zhang , Yunyi Zhou , Zihui Wu

Reinforcement learning (RL) policies often fail under dynamics that differ from training, a gap not fully addressed by domain randomization or existing adversarial RL methods. Distributionally robust RL provides a formal remedy but still…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Mintae Kim , Koushil Sreenath

Recent advancements in off-policy Reinforcement Learning (RL) have significantly improved sample efficiency, primarily due to the incorporation of various forms of regularization that enable more gradient update steps than traditional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-21 Michal Nauman , Michał Bortkiewicz , Piotr Miłoś , Tomasz Trzciński , Mateusz Ostaszewski , Marek Cygan

Constrained reinforcement learning is to maximize the expected reward subject to constraints on utilities/costs. However, the training environment may not be the same as the test one, due to, e.g., modeling error, adversarial attack,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-16 Yue Wang , Fei Miao , Shaofeng Zou

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) provides a promising direction to exploit massive amount of offline data for complex decision-making tasks. Due to the distribution shift issue, current offline RL algorithms are generally designed to be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-25 Rui Yang , Chenjia Bai , Xiaoteng Ma , Zhaoran Wang , Chongjie Zhang , Lei Han

Recurrent neural networks are a widely used class of neural architectures. They have, however, two shortcomings. First, they are often treated as black-box models and as such it is difficult to understand what exactly they learn as well as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-13 Cheng Wang , Carolin Lawrence , Mathias Niepert

Structured state space sequence (S4) models have recently achieved state-of-the-art performance on long-range sequence modeling tasks. These models also have fast inference speeds and parallelisable training, making them potentially useful…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-27 Chris Lu , Yannick Schroecker , Albert Gu , Emilio Parisotto , Jakob Foerster , Satinder Singh , Feryal Behbahani

The pursuit of robustness has recently been a popular topic in reinforcement learning (RL) research, yet the existing methods generally suffer from efficiency issues that obstruct their real-world implementation. In this paper, we introduce…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-15 Yang Hu , Haitong Ma , Bo Dai , Na Li

Recent works have studied *state entropy maximization* in reinforcement learning, in which the agent's objective is to learn a policy inducing high entropy over states visitation (Hazan et al., 2019). They typically assume full…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-05 Riccardo Zamboni , Duilio Cirino , Marcello Restelli , Mirco Mutti