Unified regularization for robust RL

It unifies existing regularization-based methods by deriving new performance bounds and formulating robust training as a constrained optimization problem.

The authors validate their approach through extensive evaluations on continuous control tasks.

A Unified and Constrained View of Regularization-Based Robust Reinforcement Learning

Regularization-based methods have become a standard approach for training Deep Reinforcement Learning policies against adversarial input perturbations. In this paper, we unify these methods by deriving new upper bounds on the performance gap between the nominal and worst-case policies. Each upper bound is expressed as an existing regularization objective plus a KL-divergence penalty between the nominal and worst-case policies, which further explains why adding a KL penalty improves robustness in practice. Building on these bounds, we formulate robust training as a constrained optimization problem, showing that existing methods correspond to the special case of a fixed Lagrange multiplier. We instead update the multiplier jointly with the policy to automatically tune the regularization weight. Finally, we conduct extensive adversarial evaluations across several continuous control tasks to validate our theoretical analysis.

This report is categorized under AITOP's "Papers" desk, focusing on US frontier AI labs and Silicon Valley technology leaders. Within our cross-regional analytical framework, it directly maps to AI developer toolchains, coding agents, and engineering workflows. Key entities and technical topics under continuous tracking include reinforcement learning, robustness, adversarial, regularization.

Source attribution: curated from arXiv cs.LG (@Amine Andam, Jamal Bentahar, Mustapha Hedabou).