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Related papers: On Entropy Control in LLM-RL Algorithms

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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,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-06 Jacob Adamczyk , Volodymyr Makarenko , Stas Tiomkin , Rahul V. Kulkarni

As access to high-quality, domain-specific data grows increasingly scarce, multi-epoch training has become a practical strategy for adapting large language models (LLMs). However, autoregressive models often suffer from performance…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-30 Jiapeng Wang , Yiwen Hu , Yanzipeng Gao , Haoyu Wang , Shuo Wang , Hongyu Lu , Jiaxin Mao , Wayne Xin Zhao , Junyi Li , Xiao Zhang

Entropy augmented to reward is known to soften the greedy argmax policy to softmax policy. Entropy augmentation is reformulated and leads to a motivation to introduce an additional entropy term to the objective function in the form of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-08 Donghoon Lee

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

This report presents a solution for the swing-up and stabilisation tasks of the acrobot and the pendubot, developed for the AI Olympics competition at IROS 2024. Our approach employs the Average-Reward Entropy Advantage Policy Optimization…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-09-16 Jean Seong Bjorn Choe , Bumkyu Choi , Jong-kook Kim

Entropy regularization is a standard technique in reinforcement learning (RL) to enhance exploration, yet it yields negligible effects or even degrades performance in Large Language Models (LLMs). We attribute this failure to the cumulative…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Chao Huang , Yujing Lu , Quangang Li , Shenghe Wang , Yan Wang , Yueyang Zhang , Long Xia , Jiashu Zhao , Zhiyuan Sun , Daiting Shi , Tingwen Liu

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) excel at complex reasoning tasks through extended chain-of-thought generation, but their reliance on lengthy intermediate steps incurs substantial computational cost. We find that the entropy of the model's…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Hongxi Yan , Qingjie Liu , Yunhong Wang

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-11 Zafarali Ahmed , Nicolas Le Roux , Mohammad Norouzi , Dale Schuurmans

Entropy regularization is an efficient technique for encouraging exploration and preventing a premature convergence of (vanilla) policy gradient methods in reinforcement learning (RL). However, the theoretical understanding of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-16 Yuhao Ding , Junzi Zhang , Hyunin Lee , Javad Lavaei

Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) has been positioned by recent literature as the canonical method for the RL part of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). PPO performs well empirically but has a heuristic motivation and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Dipan Maity

Entropy regularization is used to get improved optimization performance in reinforcement learning tasks. A common form of regularization is to maximize policy entropy to avoid premature convergence and lead to more stochastic policies for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-12 Riashat Islam , Zafarali Ahmed , Doina Precup

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

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant potential in hardware design automation, particularly in using natural language to synthesize Register-Transfer Level (RTL) code. Despite this progress, a gap…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-26 Jiahe Shi , Zhengqi Gao , Ching-Yun Ko , Duane Boning

Recent advances in reinforcement learning (RL) have improved the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs). However, the widely used Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) consistently…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-20 Chen Wang , Lai Wei , Yanzhi Zhang , Chenyang Shao , Zedong Dan , Weiran Huang , Ge Lan , Yue Wang

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

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

We propose a novel LLM-based framework for reasoning in discrete, game-theoretic tasks, illustrated with \emph{Tic-Tac-Toe}. The method integrates in-context learning with entropy-guided chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning and adaptive context…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Tommaso Felice Banfi , Sashenka Gamage

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful framework for sequential decision-making in dynamic environments, particularly when system parameters are unknown. This paper investigates RL-based control for entropy-regularized…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-12-02 Gabriel Diaz , Lucky Li , Wenhao Zhang

Analyzing and controlling system entropy is a powerful tool for regulating predictability of control systems. Applications benefiting from such approaches range from reinforcement learning and data security to human-robot collaboration. In…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-03-06 Menno van Zutphen , Giannis Delimpaltadakis , Duarte J. Antunes

Reinforcement Learning (RL) for constrained MDPs (CMDPs) is an increasingly important problem for various applications. Often, the average criterion is more suitable than the discounted criterion. Yet, RL for average-CMDPs (ACMDPs) remains…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-27 Akhil Agnihotri , Rahul Jain , Haipeng Luo