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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

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-01 Haonan Yu , Haichao Zhang , Wei Xu

We propose a general framework for entropy-regularized average-reward reinforcement learning in Markov decision processes (MDPs). Our approach is based on extending the linear-programming formulation of policy optimization in MDPs to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-05-23 Gergely Neu , Anders Jonsson , Vicenç Gómez

Reinforcement learning (RL) shows great potential in sequential decision-making. At present, mainstream RL algorithms are data-driven, which usually yield better asymptotic performance but much slower convergence compared with model-driven…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-27 Yang Guan , Jingliang Duan , Shengbo Eben Li , Jie Li , Jianyu Chen , Bo Cheng

We show that the simplest actor-critic method -- a linear softmax policy updated with TD through interaction with a linear MDP, but featuring no explicit regularization or exploration -- does not merely find an optimal policy, but moreover…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-15 Yuzheng Hu , Ziwei Ji , Matus Telgarsky

Entropy Regularisation is a widely adopted technique that enhances policy optimisation performance and stability. A notable form of entropy regularisation is augmenting the objective with an entropy term, thereby simultaneously optimising…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-26 Jean Seong Bjorn Choe , Jong-Kook Kim

We consider the task of evaluating policies of algorithmic resource allocation through randomized controlled trials (RCTs). Such policies are tasked with optimizing the utilization of limited intervention resources, with the goal of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-02-07 Aditya Mate , Bryan Wilder , Aparna Taneja , Milind Tambe

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

By leveraging differentiable dynamics, Reparameterization Policy Gradient (RPG) achieves high sample efficiency. However, current approaches are hindered by two critical limitations: the under-utilization of computationally expensive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-09 Hai Zhong , Xun Wang , Zhuoran Li , Longbo Huang

Unsupervised reinforcement learning aims at learning a generalist policy in a reward-free manner for fast adaptation to downstream tasks. Most of the existing methods propose to provide an intrinsic reward based on surprise. Maximizing or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-14 Andrew Zhao , Matthieu Gaetan Lin , Yangguang Li , Yong-Jin Liu , Gao Huang

An agent choosing between various actions tends to take the one with the lowest cost. But this choice is arguably too rigid (not adaptive) to be useful in complex situations, e.g., where exploration-exploitation trade-off is relevant in…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2018-12-04 Armen E. Allahverdyan , Aram Galstyan , Ali E. Abbas , Zbigniew R. Struzik

We introduce Random Reward Perturbation (RRP), a novel exploration strategy for reinforcement learning (RL). Our theoretical analyses demonstrate that adding zero-mean noise to environmental rewards effectively enhances policy diversity…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Haozhe Ma , Guoji Fu , Zhengding Luo , Jiele Wu , Tze-Yun Leong

Experience replay is crucial for off-policy reinforcement learning (RL) methods. By remembering and reusing the experiences from past different policies, experience replay significantly improves the training efficiency and stability of RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-01 Yongsheng Mei , Hanhan Zhou , Tian Lan , Guru Venkataramani , Peng Wei

We propose and study a general framework for regularized Markov decision processes (MDPs) where the goal is to find an optimal policy that maximizes the expected discounted total reward plus a policy regularization term. The extant…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-10-22 Xiang Li , Wenhao Yang , Zhihua Zhang

The policy gradient method enjoys the simplicity of the objective where the agent optimizes the cumulative reward directly. Moreover, in the continuous action domain, parameterized distribution of action distribution allows easy control of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-16 Md Masudur Rahman , Yexiang Xue

Model Predictive Control has been recently proposed as policy approximation for Reinforcement Learning, offering a path towards safe and explainable Reinforcement Learning. This approach has been investigated for Q-learning and actor-critic…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-04-06 Sebastien Gros , Mario Zanon

While the maximum entropy (MaxEnt) reinforcement learning (RL) framework -- often touted for its exploration and robustness capabilities -- is usually motivated from a probabilistic perspective, the use of deep probabilistic models has not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-13 Dinghuai Zhang , Aaron Courville , Yoshua Bengio , Qinqing Zheng , Amy Zhang , Ricky T. Q. Chen

Reinforcement learning methods typically use Deep Neural Networks to approximate the value functions and policies underlying a Markov Decision Process. Unfortunately, DNN-based RL suffers from a lack of explainability of the resulting…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-05-19 Shambhuraj Sawant , Sebastien Gros

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)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Hanning Zhang , Pengcheng Wang , Shizhe Diao , Yong Lin , Rui Pan , Hanze Dong , Dylan Zhang , Pavlo Molchanov , Tong Zhang

Multi-Agent Proximal Policy Optimization (MAPPO) is a variant of the Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) algorithm, specifically tailored for multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). MAPPO optimizes cooperative multi-agent settings by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Changha Lee , Gyusang Cho