Generalized Maximum Entropy Reinforcement Learning via Reward Shaping

Entropy regularization is a commonly used technique in reinforcement learning to improve exploration and cultivate a better pre-trained policy for later adaptation. Recent studies further show that the use of entropy regularization can smooth the optimization landscape and simplify the policy optimization process, indicating the value of integrating entropy into reinforcement learning. However, existing studies only consider the policy's entropy at the current state as an extra regularization term in the policy gradient or in the objective function without formally integrating the entropy in the reward function. In this article, we propose a shaped reward that includes the agent's policy entropy into the reward function. In particular, the agent's expected entropy over a distribution of the next state is added to the immediate reward associated with the current state. The addition of the agent's expected policy entropy at the next state distribution is shown to yield new soft Q-function and state function that are concise and modular. Moreover, the new reinforcement learning framework can be easily applied to the existing standard reinforcement learning algorithms, such as deep q-network (DQN) and proximal policy optimization (PPO), while inheriting the benefits of employing entropy regularization. We further present a soft stochastic policy gradient theorem based on the shaped reward and propose a new practical reinforcement learning algorithm. Finally, a few experimental studies are conducted in MuJoCo environment to demonstrate that our method can outperform an existing state-of-the-art off-policy maximum entropy reinforcement learning approach soft actor-critic by 5%-150% in terms of average return. © 2020 IEEE.