English
Related papers

Related papers: Mind Your Entropy: From Maximum Entropy to Traject…

200 papers

Reinforcement-learning-based post-training has become a key approach for improving the reasoning ability of large language models, but its token-level learning signals remain poorly understood. This work studies their heterogeneity through…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Gengyang Li , Zheng-Fan Wu , Siqi Bao , Yunfang Wu

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

During initial iterations of training in most Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms, agents perform a significant number of random exploratory steps. In the real world, this can limit the practicality of these algorithms as it can lead to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-17 Ashish Kumar Jayant , Shalabh Bhatnagar

Combining Chain-of-Thought (CoT) with Reinforcement Learning (RL) improves text-to-image (T2I) generation, yet the underlying interaction between CoT's exploration and RL's optimization remains unclear. We present a systematic entropy-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-06 Han Song , Yucheng Zhou , Jianbing Shen , Yu Cheng

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a pivotal component of large language model (LLM) post-training, and agentic RL extends this paradigm to operate as agents through multi-turn interaction and tool use. Scaling such systems exposes two…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2025-10-08 Zheyue Tan , Mustapha Abdullahi , Tuo Shi , Huining Yuan , Zelai Xu , Chao Yu , Boxun Li , Bo Zhao

Balancing exploration and exploitation is a central goal in reinforcement learning (RL). Despite recent advances in enhancing large language model (LLM) reasoning, most methods lean toward exploitation, and increasingly encounter…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Daixuan Cheng , Shaohan Huang , Xuekai Zhu , Bo Dai , Wayne Xin Zhao , Zhenliang Zhang , Furu Wei

Maximum entropy deep reinforcement learning (RL) methods have been demonstrated on a range of challenging continuous tasks. However, existing methods either suffer from severe instability when training on large off-policy data or cannot…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-10 Wenjie Shi , Shiji Song , Cheng Wu

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has become a popular method for solving control problems in power systems. Conventional DRL encourages the agent to explore various policies encoded in a neural network (NN) with the goal of maximizing the…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-10-28 Tong Wu , Anna Scaglione , Daniel Arnold

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is pivotal for enhancing Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning, yet mainstream algorithms such as GRPO and DAPO remain constrained by a coarse-grained credit assignment paradigm, where all tokens within the same…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Hongze Tan , Zihan Wang , Jianfei Pan , Jinghao Lin , Hao Wang , Yifan Wu , Tao Chen , Zhihang Zheng , Zhihao Tang , Haihua Yang

Q-learning (QL), a common reinforcement learning algorithm, suffers from over-estimation bias due to the maximization term in the optimal Bellman operator. This bias may lead to sub-optimal behavior. Double-Q-learning tackles this issue by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-21 Oren Peer , Chen Tessler , Nadav Merlis , Ron Meir

Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown significant promise for sequential portfolio optimization tasks, such as stock trading, where the objective is to maximize cumulative returns while minimizing risks using historical data. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Haochen Yuan , Minting Pan , Yunbo Wang , Siyu Gao , Philip S. Yu , Xiaokang Yang

Envisioned application areas for reinforcement learning (RL) include autonomous driving, precision agriculture, and finance, which all require RL agents to make decisions in the real world. A significant challenge hindering the adoption of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-20 Dominik Baumann , Erfaun Noorani , James Price , Ole Peters , Colm Connaughton , Thomas B. Schön

The authors of 'Unsupervised Reinforcement Learning in Multiple environments' propose a method, alpha-MEPOL, to tackle unsupervised RL across multiple environments. They pre-train a task-agnostic exploration policy using interactions from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-10 Shaurya Dewan , Anisha Jain , Zoe LaLena , Lifan Yu

In this paper, we present a new class of Markov decision processes (MDPs), called Tsallis MDPs, with Tsallis entropy maximization, which generalizes existing maximum entropy reinforcement learning (RL). A Tsallis MDP provides a unified…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-08 Kyungjae Lee , Sungyub Kim , Sungbin Lim , Sungjoon Choi , Songhwai Oh

Parallel data collection has redefined Reinforcement Learning (RL), unlocking unprecedented efficiency and powering breakthroughs in large-scale real-world applications. In this paradigm, $N$ identical agents operate in $N$ replicas of an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-25 Vincenzo De Paola , Riccardo Zamboni , Mirco Mutti , Marcello Restelli

Meta reinforcement learning (meta-RL) extracts knowledge from previous tasks and achieves fast adaptation to new tasks. Despite recent progress, efficient exploration in meta-RL remains a key challenge in sparse-reward tasks, as it requires…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-11-15 Jin Zhang , Jianhao Wang , Hao Hu , Tong Chen , Yingfeng Chen , Changjie Fan , Chongjie Zhang

The effective training of Large Language Models (LLMs) for function calling faces a critical challenge: balancing exploration of complex reasoning paths with stable policy optimization. Standard methods like Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT)…

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms aim to balance exploiting the current best strategy with exploring new options that could lead to higher rewards. Most common RL algorithms use undirected exploration, i.e., select random sequences of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-01 Bhavya Sukhija , Stelian Coros , Andreas Krause , Pieter Abbeel , Carmelo Sferrazza

This work uses the entropy-regularised relaxed stochastic control perspective as a principled framework for designing reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. Herein agent interacts with the environment by generating noisy controls…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-18 Lukasz Szpruch , Tanut Treetanthiploet , Yufei Zhang

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-20 Jacob Adamczyk , Volodymyr Makarenko , Stas Tiomkin , Rahul V. Kulkarni