arXiv:2603.12325cs.LGcs.AI2026-03

不靠试错就能高效探索,让智能体均匀覆盖环境状态。

Maximum Entropy Exploration Without the Rollouts

  • 用特征向量方法直接计算最优探索策略,无需反复试运行。
  • 在确定性网格环境中,探索效果媲美传统滚动基线方法。
  • 适合无外部奖励时的强化学习预训练,尤其关注状态覆盖效率。

高效探索仍是强化学习的核心挑战,尤其在缺乏外部奖励时,可作为数据收集的预训练目标。理想探索目标是寻找使稳态访问分布熵最大的策略,以实现对状态空间的均匀长期覆盖。现有方法通常需通过多次在线试运行估计状态访问频率,计算成本高。本文提出一种基于内在平均奖励的公式,奖励由访问分布本身决定,使最优策略最大化稳态熵。该目标的熵正则化版本具有谱特性:相关稳态分布可从与问题相关的转移矩阵的主特征向量中求得。这一洞察催生了新算法EVE(基于特征向量的探索),避免显式试运行和分布估计,通过类似值迭代的方式进行迭代更新。针对原始未正则化目标,采用后验策略迭代(PPI)方法,单调提升熵并保证收敛。在标准假设下证明了EVE的收敛性,并实证表明其能高效生成高稳态熵策略,在确定性网格世界中探索性能媲美基于滚动的基准方法。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Efficient exploration remains a central challenge in reinforcement learning, serving as a useful pretraining objective for data collection, particularly when an external reward function is unavailable. A principled formulation of the exploration problem is to find policies that maximize the entropy of their induced steady-state visitation distribution, thereby encouraging uniform long-run coverage of the state space. Many existing exploration approaches require estimating state visitation frequencies through repeated on-policy rollouts, which can be computationally expensive. In this work, we instead consider an intrinsic average-reward formulation in which the reward is derived from the visitation distribution itself, so that the optimal policy maximizes steady-state entropy. An entropy-regularized version of this objective admits a spectral characterization: the relevant stationary distributions can be computed from the dominant eigenvectors of a problem-dependent transition matrix. This insight leads to a novel algorithm for solving the maximum entropy exploration problem, EVE (EigenVector-based Exploration), which avoids explicit rollouts and distribution estimation, instead computing the solution through iterative updates, similar to a value-based approach. To address the original unregularized objective, we employ a posterior-policy iteration (PPI) approach, which monotonically improves the entropy and converges in value. We prove convergence of EVE under standard assumptions and demonstrate empirically that it efficiently produces policies with high steady-state entropy, achieving competitive exploration performance relative to rollout-based baselines in deterministic grid-world environments.

强化学习探索策略熵最大化

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