Entropy-Regularized Reinforcement Learning for the Regime-Switching Consumption-Investment Problem

Abstract

This paper establishes an entropy-regularized reinforcement learning (ERRL) framework for the continuous-time consumption-investment problem under a regime-switching market model with general utility functions. By incorporating randomized exploratory policies and Shannon entropy regularization into the stochastic optimal control formulation, we derive closed-form representations for the optimal exploratory consumption and investment strategies. Specifically, the optimal investment strategy follows a multivariate Gaussian distribution, whereas the optimal consumption strategy takes the form of a Gibbs measure---which specializes to a Gamma distribution under logarithmic utility and a non-standard exponential distribution under power utility. Crucially, our theoretical analysis reveals that the classical deterministic optimal decisions correspond to the mode---rather than the mean---of these exploratory distributions. Furthermore, we establish the convergence of the exploratory value function to its classical unregularized counterpart as the temperature parameter vanishes. For algorithmic design, we develop a continuous-time q-learning framework grounded in a novel continuous-time q-function, prove the policy improvement theorem, and establish martingale characterizations for both on-policy and off-policy learning. We find that parameterizing the actor network based on theoretical distribution families can help accelerate convergence and enhance numerical stability. Furthermore, numerical experiments across regime-switching environments provide empirical support for our theoretical findings, demonstrating stable loss convergence as well as the monotonicity and concavity of the learned value functions.