Related papers: On Entropy Control in LLM-RL Algorithms

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…

Reasoning ability has become a defining capability of Large Language Models (LLMs), with Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) emerging as a key paradigm to enhance it. However, RLVR training often suffers from policy…

Maximum entropy (MaxEnt) RL maximizes a combination of the original task reward and an entropy reward. It is believed that the regularization imposed by entropy, on both policy improvement and policy evaluation, together contributes to good…

Long-term training of large language models (LLMs) requires maintaining stable exploration to prevent the model from collapsing into sub-optimal behaviors. Entropy is crucial in this context, as it controls exploration and helps avoid…

Recently, Agentic Reinforcement Learning (Agentic RL) has made significant progress in incentivizing the multi-turn, long-horizon tool-use capabilities of web agents. While mainstream agentic RL algorithms autonomously explore…

We investigate an entropy-regularized reinforcement learning (RL) approach to optimal stopping problems motivated by real option models. Classical stopping rules are strict and non-randomized, limiting natural exploration in RL settings. To…

Reinforcement learning (RL) has enabled complex reasoning abilities in large language models (LLMs). However, most RL algorithms suffer from performance saturation, preventing continued gains as RL training scales. This problem can be…

Reinforcement learning (RL) has substantially improved the ability of large language model (LLM) agents to interact with environments and solve multi-turn tasks. However, effective agentic RL remains challenging: sparse outcome-only rewards…

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…

Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in performing complex multi-step reasoning, yet they continue to struggle with mathematical reasoning, often making systematic errors. A promising solution is reinforcement learning (RL)…

Entropy regularization is known to improve exploration in sequential decision-making problems. We show that this same mechanism can also lead to nearly unbiased and lower-variance estimates of the mean reward in the optimize-and-estimate…

Many potential applications of reinforcement learning (RL) require guarantees that the agent will perform well in the face of disturbances to the dynamics or reward function. In this paper, we prove theoretically that maximum entropy…

Language models have improved by orders of magnitude with the recent emergence of Transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs). LLMs have demonstrated their ability to generate natural code that is highly similar to code written by…

Existing training criteria in automatic speech recognition(ASR) permit the model to freely explore more than one time alignments between the feature and label sequences. In this paper, we use entropy to measure a model's uncertainty, i.e.…

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…

Reinforcement learning (RL) has enabled machine learning models to achieve significant advances in many fields. Most recently, RL has empowered frontier language models to solve challenging math, science, and coding problems. However,…

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a key paradigm for post-training large language models (LLMs), but the widely used Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) often suffers from entropy collapse: exploration quickly disappears, policies…

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…

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…

Existing methods to enhance the reasoning capability of large language models predominantly rely on supervised fine-tuning (SFT) followed by reinforcement learning (RL) on reasoning-specific data. These approaches critically depend on…