A Comparative Theoretical Analysis of Entropy Control Methods in Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2604.09676v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a key approach for enhancing reasoning in large language models (LLMs), yet scalable training is often hindered by the rapid collapse of policy entropy, which leads to premature convergence and performance saturation. This paper provides a comparative theoretical analysis of two entropy control strategies: traditional entropy regularization and the recently proposed covariance-based mechanism. We establish a