This section is optional and included for readers who are interested in why the method works. If you wish, you can refer to the original paper on cross-entropy, which will be given at the end of the section.

The basis of the cross-entropy method lies in the importance sampling theorem, which states this:

In our RL case, H(x) is a reward value obtained by some policy x and p(x) is a distribution of all possible policies. We don't want to maximize our reward by searching all possible policies, instead we want to find a way to approximate p(x)H(x) by q(x), iteratively minimizing the distance between them. The distance between two probability distributions is calculated by Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence which is as follows:

The first term in KL is called entropy and doesn't depend on that, so could be omitted during the minimization. The second term is called cross-entropy and is a very common optimization objective in DL.

Combining...