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arXiv · 2511.11592

Mind Your Entropy: From Maximum Entropy to Trajectory Entropy-Constrained RL

Guojian Zhan·Likun Wang·Pengcheng Wang·Feihong Zhang·Jingliang Duan·Masayoshi Tomizuka·Shengbo Eben Li
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Abstract

Maximum entropy has become a mainstream off-policy reinforcement learning (RL) framework for balancing exploitation and exploration. However, two bottlenecks still limit further performance improvement: (1) non-stationary Q-value estimation caused by jointly injecting entropy and updating its weighting parameter, i.e., temperature; and (2) short-sighted local entropy tuning that adjusts temperature only according to the current single-step entropy, without considering the effect of cumulative entropy over time. In this paper, we extends maximum entropy framework by proposing a trajectory entropy-constrained reinforcement learning (TECRL) framework to address these two challenges. Within this framework, we first separately learn two Q-functions, one associated with reward and the other with entropy, ensuring clean and stable value targets unaffected by temperature updates. Then, the dedicated entropy Q-function, explicitly quantifying the expected cumulative entropy, enables us to enforce a trajectory entropy constraint and consequently control the policy long-term stochasticity. Building on this TECRL framework, we develop a practical off-policy algorithm, DSAC-E, by extending the state-of-the-art distributional soft actor-critic with three refinements (DSAC-T). Empirical results on the OpenAI Gym benchmark demonstrate that our DSAC-E can achieve higher returns and better stability.

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Guojian Zhan, Likun Wang, Pengcheng Wang, Feihong Zhang, Jingliang Duan, Masayoshi Tomizuka, Shengbo Eben Li. 2025-10-25. Mind Your Entropy: From Maximum Entropy to Trajectory Entropy-Constrained RL. https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.11592

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